“The times they are a changin’.” So goes the famous Bob Dylan anthem to the baby boom generation’s coming of age. Never have his words had greater meaning than now. Of course there is the old adage, “the only thing constant in life is change.”

Ironically it was Dylan's impressionable 60s generation of love and drugs who witnessed the landing of the first man on the moon and computer miniaturization that made it possible.

25 years later, computers which in the 50s required hundreds of square feet to operate at a first-grade level were able to fit comfortably on a desktop and handle advanced equations. The great metamorphosis from analog to digital was in full swing, arguably the most profound change in human history.

Morph forward but a few decades and witness institutions built brick by brick to towering edifices crumbling before our eyes:

• office space replaced by work at home
• communion and social gatherings relegated to chat rooms
• retail chains, mom and pop stores and shopping malls closing their doors
• television once dominated by 3 national networks now hemorrhaging viewers to teenyboppers with iPhones
• video news now the province of independent and citizen journalists
• the disappearance of newspapers, street-side newspaper boxes and newsstands
• distrust in mainstream media news outlets of all stripes
• the creep of calls to limit speech by our “leaders” once known as our representatives.

So what does a moon shot in the 60s have to do with America Today Films?

Webster defines “woke” as: “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues” (especially issues of racial and social justice) That’s pretty heady stuff but also on the ideological side of things. Important societal facts and issues leaves a lot of room for personal opinion.

On the other hand one might wake up some day, look around and say, “what is all this s**t?” Americans are daily blasted with advertising, partisan news, fake news, gaudy digital graphics, phony product spokespersons, sexual come-ons, deviant behavior, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Not everyone has a room with a view, but most everyone has a big flat-screen television to view. After decades of broadcast and cable TV people are waking up to the phony reality offered by the view through that “window.”

The man on the moon may have destroyed the world as we thought it was but at this stage it’s liberating those willing to cut the cable and divorce themselves from the b.s.



Toto has effectively pulled back the curtain revealing an elite ruling class that has lost, if it ever had it, touch with the common man.