Looking Back On A Different Time
An article about this TV show came across my Facebook feed this morning, and for a moment it took me away from MAGA America back to a better time and a better America. It’s memories of that better America that are the most tormenting now. But if anything they need to be held even more dear if we are to stand any chance of prevailing, and winning our country back.
Before there was Bill Nye there was Mr. Wizard. This was a favorite Saturday morning TV show back when I was a kid.
Lounging in front of the TV set back then I would have been about the same age as the kids who came to visit Mr. Wizard.
It was a different time, the post Sputnik period of the Cold War, and providing school kids with a grounding in science was important for the national defense. So science was considered to be a subject even elementary school kids should learn as part of a comprehensive education, along with geography and math. I remember doing my science projects with classmates in 4th, 5th, and 6th grades. But there is also this: I grew up in Maryland, in the Washington DC suburbs, and I have to wonder what my grade school memories would have been had I gone to school elsewhere, especially the deeply fundamentalist south. Let me explain…
There was another science series I used to love watching, which were the Bell Lab’s Science films. You knew it was going to be a good day in class when they brought out the Bell & Howell 16mm film projector, and especially when you saw the film cans had one of those Bell Lab’s titles on them. The episodes touched on different subjects, such as how the sun creates light and heat, how blood moves through the body and brings oxygen and nutrients to the cells, and what cosmic rays are and where they came from. Every one of the episodes Frank Capra directed ended with a plea to regard science and religion as not just compatible, but that science itself was an expression of mankind’s faith in God…
From the beginning of the project, Capra had insisted that the films would explore the relationship of science and religion. In his autobiography, Capra paraphrased his early comments to a meeting of the scientific advisory board assembled by AT&T and N. W. Ayer: “If I make a science film, I will have to say that science research is just another expression of the Holy Spirit that works in all men. Furthermore, I will say that science, in essence, is just another facet of man’s quest for God.” At a later stage in the project, Capra wrote that the films would have “the obligation to stress or at the very least to acknowledge the spiritual side of man’s make-up—to acknowledge that all good things come from God—including science”.
I’m sure Capra firmly believed all this, but it’s probably the only way those episodes could have been shown in the deep south.
And now look at where we are…
