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I just came across this poem a few days ago and had the opportunity to think about it.

It’s a valuable perspective to hear. As someone prone to getting caught up in the breathless excitement about science, progress, human achievement, etc., it is a hard truth that these things are abstract and not relevant for people who are struggling with day-to-day life, particularly when those struggles are a result of the same government that is executing this mission.

However, the older I get, the less I bind to the idea of a single, correct truth. This perspective doesn’t invalidate the perspective that the mission is valuable. The complexity of the system in which this is taking place means that these things (moon missions and affordable healthcare) aren’t fungible for one another; his poverty wasn’t the result of the moon mission, it was the result of EVERYTHING that had happened over the 100 years prior.

So it’s useful to hear. It’s a sharp, valid reality check for those of us who like to think in big, abstract concepts. And, it’s one perspective among myriad valid perspectives.

Kind of a false dichotomy. How about medical care as a right for a big abstract concept? He's not anti-science here, he's against the inequality of its distribution.

> Kind of a false dichotomy.

That’s precisely my point. Some stanzas in the poem suggest that there’s a direct connection between the moon mission and his poverty.

> The man just upped my rent last night > cause Whitey’s on the moon

> Was all that money I made last year > For Whitey on the moon?

And my point then was that I can see and empathize with his frustration, but I don’t feel it’s a singularly correct perspective to the exclusion of the perspective that the missions were of great value.

But he's not blaming his poverty on "whitey on the moon" but the lack of healthcare. There is an opportunity cost to war, Moon/Mars missions etc.

I don’t mean to badger, but how can this stanza:

> The man just upped my rent last night > cause Whitey’s on the moon

Be interpreted as anything other than directly blaming his poverty on the moon mission?

There is an opportunity cost to everything. Moving money from energy research to food programs may mean not having an energy breakthrough that could potentially cut down food costs (and a lot of other things) dramatically in the long run.

The poem itself seems to mix several things (It is a poem, and can say whatever it wants of course). What parent said doesn't preclude medical care as a right for a concept, though.

Also, a cursory search says around 2 trillion are spent on healthcare (effectively or not is irrelevant in this context) and NASA moon exploration costs $90B. Doesn't feel like these are all mutually exclusive.

I don't think it's actually a useful perspective at all. The poem is racial resentment repackaged as a means to guilt trip people into feeling bad about adventure, science, and exploration. Unless they were pretty well read at a young age, most millennials probably first experienced this poem in the film First Man, where it is read as a backdrop to Apollo 11 traveling to the moon. It's a great scene because the juxtaposition is stark. We can either hold ourselves back an an endless and futile journey on solving the human condition of poverty and inequality, or we can explore the stars. It's an easy choice.

> We can either hold ourselves back an an endless and futile journey on solving the human condition of poverty and inequality, or we can explore the stars. It's an easy choice.

Wait... Are you suggesting that "exploring the stars" is less of an endless and futile journey than dealing with poverty and inequality?

Solving poverty and inequality is for the short term - they'll come back and need solving again no matter how many times you already solved them. But once the stars are explored, they stay explored forever. So yea, that's moving forwards and the other isn't.

The closest stars are way too far to reach on any reasonable timescale. That's not even mentioning the fact that moving forwards is a vague goal. Moving forwards towards what exactly? And if the US government got off of it's ass to... Oh I don't know, maybe fix the bullshit healthcare system we have and help people with tax money instead of bombing people for Israel things would improve quite a bit in a very short time. That's assuming we don't bomb each other over terroritorial squabbles first. In any case I don't really understand your defeatism when it comes to inequality but when it's something as difficult as interstellar space travel you seem to be optimistic.

It's not optimism and defeatism, it's recognizing that one of them lasts and the other doesn't. Political changes like you listed can easily be reversed in future, but if we discover something in space, we'll keep that discovery forever even if we stop exploring.

> they'll come back and need solving again

So like "whitey going to the moon" again on Artemis II?

Only 75%

No, not at all.

I am saying that there we never be a world in which poverty and inequality do not exist, unless we are all dead. Maybe it's because I'm an American, but this perspective that grand adventure and exploration is pointless or not worth it is totally foreign to me.

I'm an American, too, and justice-for-all is my watchword—not this "grand adventure" costume for self-aggrandizement.

Sorry, how is it a costume? It literally is a grand adventure.

It's a disguise for self-aggrandizement.

"Grand" and "adventure" are subjective terms.

> We can either hold ourselves back an an endless and futile journey on solving the human condition of poverty and inequality, or we can explore the stars. It's an easy choice.

"Sorry, poor people; but I want to live on Jupiter so you're just gonna have to starve to death".

What a loser

Yea what other technological progress was only wanted by losers? Most of it, by your standard. Yet it's also technological progress that has reduced poverty. You don't care about the people of the future and want to keep them in poverty for the sake of the people of today. I wouldn't call you a loser for that but you do have bad morals.

Technological progress had to invent poverty before it could reduce it.

Is it meant to guilt trip people? Or is it an honest expression of the frustration (and yes, racial resentment) that the author feels?

This is why I consider it a useful perspective to hear. I read this as a human being simply saying “this is how I feel in these circumstances”.

It’s uncomfortable, and I don’t believe that space exploration should be gated on solving poverty and inequality, but it is important to understand that an intelligent, thoughtful human being arrived at this place.

In a sense I feel that this is actually an appeal to the same sense of curiosity that drives space exploration. Why do we explore space? To learn and understand. Why should we consider human perspectives we don’t agree with? To learn and understand.

You could plausibly argue that the poem, when it was written, was meant as an honest expression of frustration, but the context in which it was deployed makes whatever original intent of the author irrelevant. The whole point of the poem's deployment once it was published was to say "white people are wasting money on a moon rocket, they should be spending money on inner city black poverty". Otherwise I think you're reading a bit too much into it. There's nothing more to learn or understand from this poem. "Don't spend money on rockets and going to space, spend it on entitlements and 'fighting' poverty". We get it.

> an endless and futile journey on solving the human condition of poverty and inequality

It’s very telling that you think poverty can’t be solved.

—

I can't pay no doctor bills

But whitey's on the moon

Ten years from now I'll be payin' still

While whitey's on the moon

The man just upped my rent last night

Cause whitey's on the moon

No hot water, no toilets, no lights

But whitey's on the moon

I wonder why he's upping me?

Cause whitey's on the moon?

Well I was already giving him fifty a week

With whitey on the moon.

Rest in peace Gil-Scott Heron.

The author of this poem went to great lengths to show his racism. It reminds me of a post, probably on Reddit, of a similar racist nature. Just when it's going in the other direction it's clearer.

The post was by a man, supposedly white, who had to pull his child or children from private school because he could not pay for it. His frustration was based on the fact that his taxes were higher than the school tuition, and that another student at the school, a black student, was having his tuition paid by the government. He implied that he was paying for another person's education, and could not afford his own child's education. He saw the same dichotomy as that expressed in the poem, in the other direction.

He could be expressing the generational frustration of being black in America. When things are so segregated you feel you are looking across at a different country landing on the moon, you might write such a poem.

> He could be expressing the generational frustration of being black in America

I’m sure that’s how the racist young Republicans would defend themselves too. It’s hard being a young man in America today.

It's safe to assume that racist young Republicans contribute more to the difficulty of being black in America than vice versa. What's your point?

> It's safe to assume that racist young Republicans contribute more to the difficulty of being black in America than vice versa

If racism follows “eye for an eye,” sure. I don’t think most people feel someone being discriminated at when young is excused from being racist when older. If that is the case, everyone who had any poverty in their childhood is off the hook for horrible behavior. That isn’t true, at least for most voters anywhere.

I get the general frustration there, but it's weird to focus on NASA's budget when it's such a teeny tiny fraction of the total.

Yes, there's a lot of government waste, but NASA ain't it.

And I would suggest that the billionaire class and unfettered capitalism are far more responsible for the modern day version of Scott-Heron's woes than the good ol' government scapegoat.

If DOGE served for anything at all it was for showing that there isn’t even that much “waste” per se. If there’s any waste it’s in the Pentagon which can’t even audit itself, but of course DOGE didn’t even get close to that. It was all performative for them.

I think they proved that the waste is not easily defined. I would call fraud, waste, but a computer program isn't likely to discover it without boots on the ground looking to see if the money is actually going where the records indicate.

The richest person in the world, who has had billions from government handouts, decided they were going to audit government spending.

Fraud doesn't even begin to describe it.

SpaceX did not receive government subsidies. Government contracts, yes, but those are payments for services delivered, not subsidies or handouts.

Those contracts are direct subsidies. They would not exist in the private market. Government spending subsidizes whatever it spends on.

> Those contracts are direct subsidies.

They are not. You are imputing your own meanings into the word "subsidy". If you buy a Coke from a Coke machine, you are not "subsidizing" the machine's vendor.

Interesting. For all of Gil Scott-Heron's brilliance, this is by far my least favorite work of his.

Apparently Artemis 2 Victor Glover listened to this weekly on his commute to NASA.

Great share, thank you!

Yes, I remember that nihilistic piece of race rage bait and I remember it well. Now that 'non-whitey' is gliding past the moon and has shown he is past all that race-rage baiting by stating that [1] this is just — this is human history ... It’s the story of humanity — not black history, not women’s history I hope that the like of Scott-Heron and those who like to push this type of narrative are willing to finally take that hammer to ram down that nail into the coffin of the 'systemic racism narrative'.

No, I'm not holding my breath, the narrative if far too profitable for far too many people [2] to be put to rest.

[1] https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-black-astronaut-on-arte...

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11151740-racism-is-not-dead...

Wanda Sykes is also famous for a pithier more recent take on it

Why are you so angry about a black person's perspective of what the moon landing meant to them? Rather than putting a nail in the coffin of the "systemic racism narrative", your post underlines how long we still have to go as a society to take black people's perspectives seriously, rather than simply denigrating them as "race bait."

Their HN profile is a bunch of complaints about being rate-limited for shitty takes. It's the norm.

It's fine to not be interested, but this time one of the astronauts is black