President John F. Kennedy committed America to landing on the moon in a speech on Sept. 12, 1962. It was spring. The calendar said otherwise, yes. But, as has been argued before in this space, Kennedy presided over a season of renewal, a season when optimism was birthright, confidence, high and horizons, endless.
“We choose to go to the moon … and do the other things,” he famously declared, “not because they are easy but because they are hard.”
And no one doubted for a minute that we could do hard things. Because America was a nation in spring.
Last Monday, on the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s speech, President Joe Biden committed America to ending cancer as we know it. And it was winter.
Again, that has less to do with the calendar than with the national spirit. As singer Gil Scott-Heron once said, “Politically and philosophically and psychologically, there has only been the season of ice. It is a season of frozen dreams and frozen nightmares, a scene of frozen progress and frozen ideas, frozen aspirations and inspirations.” He said this in discussing his song, “Winter In America,” a bleak survey of “a nation that just can’t stand much more.”