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Kahlil Byrd

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    Voting

    Landing on the moon was a hard thing. So is preserving democracy.

    Kahlil Byrd
    June 30, 2022
    Man on the moon

    Astronaut Buzz Aldrin deploys a scientific experiment package on the surface of the moon in 1969.

    Neil Armstrong/NASA/Getty Images

    Byrd is CEO of Invest America and serves on the Leadership Now Project’s steering committee.

    "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
    John F. Kennedy
    Rice University, 1962

    President Kennedy's iconic Texas speech formalized our national commitment to space innovation and defeating communism. Listeners came away from that moment focused on "how." How will we reach the moon by 1970? How can we beat the Soviet Union? How do we keep focused in an era with so many competing civic and national security priorities?

    That one hard thing – reaching a cold, shiny, far-away rock – is rightly history's focal point. My read of that moment is that Kennedy's admonition to reach the moon was both a clear goal and a beautiful metaphor. America's greatness always lies in our exploration and mastering of "the other things."

    In the early 1960s, those other things included throwing off the yoke of American apartheid; solving malnutrition and poverty; squaring post-World War II industrial growth with worker rights, and mastering low-level international skirmishes while avoiding nuclear conflagration.

    Today's problem set is just as tough. Navigating a tricky inflation economy; adapting to Covid life; managing culture wars plaguing our national conversations; war drums in Eastern Europe; tension with Asia. Next to — and many of us think above – these challenges is our hardest current problem: preserving and protecting our core democracy in the face of rising authoritarian tendencies.

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