War And Prejudice In Herb Lock's Washington Post

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Transported by Herb Lock appeared in the Washington Post on July 18, 1969. This was two days after the moon landing, and Lock’s perspective is slightly negative. He speaks to an entire world enthralled at the sight of man landing on the moon, and chastises them for forgetting more earthly problems.
In the cartoon, the earth is covered in a dark cloud, labeled “war,” “poverty,” and “prejudice.” These dark clouds symbolize the dark troubles our earth was facing in the 1960s, and still grapple with today.
The 1960s were a very turbulent time. The Vietnam War was escalating terribly, as a proxy for the Cold War that was being fought between the USSR and America. Americans went to bed each night fearful of nuclear holocaust. They also were increasingly going to bed hungry, as the divide between rich and poor was increasing. This reality led to the creation of “The war on Poverty”: Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and other social welfare programs, which were only recently legislated. This era was also the time of the civil rights movement. Only five years earlier the Voting Rights Act had been passed. Prejudice was still a huge factor in many people’s lives. These issues are coming up every day in Lock’s paper, the Washington Post. He is commenting on this reality in the form of an editorial cartoon. …show more content…

For a short while, all of mankind was transported to the moon. Not literally, of course, but with the help of television, every human felt as though they were sitting next to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on that lunar rover. Lock taps into that feeling by having the man on the moon represent how every human with a television was feeling: hands on knees, sitting forward in excitement, nothing else but the images of the television in their eyes. The emotion is clear: unbridled excitement, a sense of possibility, amazed

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