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Sir: Remember when trying to "go to the moon" was a synonym for forget it? Well, we did it. We went to the moon. And your "middle America" was just the flagwaving contingent for 200 million people who were all, in their ways, flying just as high as NASA's Columbia, because maybe, just maybe, they all of a sudden realized that hunger and poverty and ghettos and education weren't all problems whose solutions were as distant as the moon.
ANNE EDWARDS Radburn, N.J.
Sir: Yes, Apollo 11 was indeed a triumph of middle America. It showed what we and our values can create. That's one reason some of our liberal-radical detractors hate and fear the space program. They regard us of middle America as so many cows, to be milked without limit for their social programs. To keep us docile, they try to make us feel guilty for crimes we didn't commit, racial hatreds we don't feel (some of us are black too), poverty we didn't create. Apollo 11 smashed through that unearned guilt the way it punched through the Florida skies. Hearing "The Eagle has landed," no power on earth could have deprived us of the pride we had earned.
They tried, though. In our hour of triumph, while the Eagle was still on the moon, our carping critics kept on trying to suggest that we had no right to feel pride in Apollo because the poor were still poor. Back to the milking machine, old cow. Pride isn't for you.
But "The Eagle has landed," and we remember. We always will.
DAVID C. WILLIAMS Albuquerque
What Will Be Left?
Sir: Your new section, Environment, is not only an achievement in itself, but it has also spotlighted the men of the year, Senators Muskie and Jackson.
While we zip to the moon, wage wars, fight poverty, create ever deadlier weapons, and generally confine our thinking to today's world, the Senators and intelligent conservationists everywhere are trying to forge a positive answer to the question: If man survives his political and economic blunders, will there be enough left of mother nature to make survival worth surviving for? Now if we could just set up an International Office of Environmental Quality. . . .
MRS. GILBERT F. DONNELLY Cleveland
Sir: When pesticides and weed killers were first introduced, I, like most laymen, accepted the verdict of those who claimed to know, and took for granted that it was in keeping with the age of miracle drugs. Now I feel that the actual conditions are much more grim than you in your steel-and-concrete towers know.
For ten years I have worked here at the courthouse, and every year until last I saw hundreds and hundreds of the beautiful little pine siskin on the lawn, as the dandelions first went to seed. This year the tally was 17 or 18. And they didn't behave in a normal manner, for instead of spending a week or so here, they hung around as though lost until a few days ago —the last time I noted them.