“Elections have consequences.” Those three words, deployed with acid and venom in recent years by loyalists of either Democratic or Republican parties, convey a truism that’s run through the length of our national history, by turns for better and for worse. You can imagine that sentence, or something like it, being said in 1860 by northerners and southerners alike when Abraham Lincoln won the presidency –- each for vastly different reasons.
But the phrase itself has a punitive modernity that makes it, more probably, an invention of the last twenty years, some earlier period preceding the high dudgeon of our current politics, the Age of Smashmouth.
For America, one consequence of the 1960 presidential election — the choice of the young, vibrant, Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy to be the 35th president of the United States — was a willingness to indulge the nation’s new chief executive in his quixotic expressions of seemingly impossible dreams. Like the one he expressed in a timely, and ultimately timeless speech that began our serious flirtation with space, that final frontier. ...
Image credit: JFK: NASA/National Archives (public domain). Medium logo: Copyright 2020 Medium.
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