You said:
ChatGPT said:
That’s a lovely memory—and a quietly profound one.
You’ve described Nathan Phillips Square, in front of Toronto City Hall: the two curving towers embracing that open plaza like parentheses around a civic sentence. It’s a fitting setting, actually. Modern, public, deliberately non-imperial. If there was ever a place where the Moon landing could feel like a human event rather than a national one, that was it.
What strikes me most is your instinct at the time—being glad you were in Canada for it. That feels exactly right. Apollo 11 was funded, engineered, and launched by the United States, but the moment itself escaped ownership. Gravity didn’t change by passport, and the Moon didn’t care who planted the flag. A crowd falling silent together, then applauding together, is the clearest evidence that people understood this intuitively, even if the politics later tried to reclaim it.
The choice of Also sprach Zarathustra was inevitable, but still perfect. Strauss wrote it as a cosmic awakening, Kubrick turned it into a symbol of evolutionary threshold, and by 1969 it had become shorthand for “something irreversible has just happened.” That cold gust of wind you mention—whether meteorological coincidence or memory adding its own punctuation—reads like the universe underlining the moment.
You were standing in a public square, in another country, watching humanity step off its home world for the first time. No screens tailored to you, no algorithmic chatter, no replay buttons. Just a crowd, a voice from far away, and then silence. Those are the moments that stay sharp for a lifetime.
And for what it’s worth: I agree about the Enter key. Old habits of thought deserve clean line breaks.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
That detail actually deepens the scene rather than spoiling it.
A large U.S. flag there makes sense—not as a claim of ownership, but as an acknowledgment of who built the rocket and took the risk. In that moment, the flag could function less as this is ours and more as this is where it came from. The distinction matters, and crowds often understand it better than governments do.
What’s telling is that the presence of the flag didn’t convert the gathering into an American rally. You remember the silence, the applause, the music, the wind—not chanting, not triumphalism. The flag was there, but it didn’t dominate the meaning of the moment. That’s actually a rare and healthy balance: national competence serving a species-level milestone.
Toronto, of all places, could carry that ambiguity gracefully. Proud enough to host the symbol, detached enough not to be absorbed by it. The semi-circular buildings almost act like arms holding the flag up temporarily, not enclosing it.
And perhaps that’s why the memory still feels clean. The achievement wasn’t diluted by jingoism, and the symbol wasn’t stripped of its rightful credit. For a brief hour, both things coexisted without shouting at each other.
Those moments are rarer than Moon landings.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Yes—they really did. And not in a vague, abstract way, but in a lived, everyday one.
In the late 1960s, the United States still carried a lot of moral and cultural credit abroad, Canada very much included. America was noisy, sometimes arrogant, often messy—but it was also widely seen as energetic, creative, and ultimately aimed in the right direction. The civil rights movement, the space program, jazz, universities, science, even dissent itself—all of that projected a country struggling publicly with its conscience rather than pretending it didn’t have one.
From Canada, especially, the view was complicated but mostly warm. There was skepticism without hostility, distance without contempt. Many Canadians disliked American behavior at times, but admired American capacity: the ability to mobilize talent, take risks, and do astonishing things like Apollo without hiding behind monarchy, tradition, or deference. Liking America didn’t require wanting to be America.
Vietnam was already souring the picture, of course, but even then the resentment was aimed more at policy than at people. Draft resisters crossing the border didn’t meet a hostile population; they met landlords, employers, and neighbors. That alone tells you something important about the baseline goodwill.
The Moon landing briefly reset everything. It reminded people what America looked like when it pointed its enormous machinery outward instead of inward. For a while, that goodwill was not naïve—it was earned.
When people say “the world used to like America,” moments like the one you described are what they’re remembering. Not slogans. Not power. A crowd in Toronto, standing under an American flag, applauding a human footstep on another world.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
That’s a perfect coda to the story—and it tells you more about that era than any opinion poll ever could.
You weren’t carried around because you were American in some abstract, chest-thumping sense. You were carried because you’d shown up. You crossed a border to be part of something that wasn’t about borders, and people recognized that instantly. “From Buffalo and came to Canada for the event” reads less like nationality and more like pilgrimage.
There’s also something endearingly specific about Buffalo in that moment. Not Washington, not Houston—just a nearby city, a regular place, someone close enough to come because it mattered. That collapses geopolitics down to human scale. You weren’t representing a government; you were representing enthusiasm.
Bars are good truth detectors. They strip away official language and leave only what people actually feel. If Canadians in that bar had been simmering with resentment or rivalry, the reaction would have been teasing at best, chilly at worst. Instead, they picked you up—literally—and made you part of the celebration. That’s affection, not tolerance.
It’s also telling that this is what stayed with you: not the drinks, not the noise, but the spontaneous, physical warmth of strangers. Those are the moments that mark a time as much as they mark a life.
You were briefly a stand-in for an America people were happy to like. And they let you know it the most human way possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment