When I was a child, probably no more than 6 or so, I had a book by Mae Blacker Freeman called “You will go to the Moon.” Later I would learn that the book had been published originally in 1959, but a 6 year old with a book that has a picture of the Cat in the Hat on the cover telling him that he can read it all by himself has little interest in publication dates.
The premise of the book was that in the future that would come in my life space travel would become so common that everyone would be traveling to the moon, where they would live and work and vacation, driving moon cars and staying at moon bases with other people that had decided to live and work and vacation on the moon. The future was like that back then, it held a lot of promise.
Among the promises the future held, in addition to moon bases and moon vacations, were flying cars and robotic talking dogs. We didn’t get those either.
My generation was promised a lot of things. The “greatest generation”, so named by Tom Brokaw, made those promises in our books, our movies, our cartoons, our amusement parks and so on, but along the way those promises were lost. I don’t think it was the greatest generation that lost them, they had the vision. It was the baby boomers that followed them that decided that computers and cellular phones and hand guns made of plastic were a more feasible vision and built those instead of moon bases.
Maybe they were right but I was promised the moon and robotic talking dogs. I will trade my cell phone for a flying car.
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