The fact that humanity sent people back to the moon barely even registered. Crazy times.
Are you sure that people would have cared much even in better times?
Although I'm just as subject to the fatigue as everyone else, this just isn't a pursuit that I see as important.
TBH I think dealing with global warming, cancer, homelessness, AI impact on human cognitive development, and the loneliness epidemic are far higher priorities.
"Accompanied by conga drums, Scott-Heron's narrative tells of medical debt, high taxes and poverty experienced at the time of the Apollo Moon landings. The poem critiques the resources spent on the space program while Black Americans were experiencing social and economic disparities at home."
I mean, part of why they cut the Apollo program short was because nobody cared back then either, after the first ~2 landings, so they muddled on a while longer but support simply vanished in a hurry. It'd be surprising if people started caring more now. I suppose if we land people on the moon it'll be a bit more of an event than this one (the landing, not the launch) but I'd expect interest to plummet again after that. Hopefully they have better-selected video feeds for the landing than they did for this launch, I had my kids watch it and it was bad enough I think I'll have trouble getting them to sit down for another NASA launch stream.
I think it's more that the impact of all these constant string of "crises" ends up having very little impact on the average American's lifestyle. Groceries a bit more expensive, gas higher, rent continues to creep up. Some giant incomprehensible national debt number gets higher. Those all suck and people complain about them - but they are complaining about them in packed bars while they drink $7 beers and eat $30 burgers and fries.
You can only yell so many times that the world is ending before people tune it out since their day to day lives are largely unchanged. Just look at the focus on complaining about almost irrelevant things like the price of eggs or whatever totally irrelevant culture war topic of the day. It's societal bike shedding.
I am firmly of the belief (and have been for quite some time) that the "average" middle class American is going to need severe pain - as in widespread great depression level pain - before anything really changes at all at the ground level. Americans have simply become so used to living the lifestyle being part of an insulated hegemonic superpower empire that they have taken that for granted as how things generally will always be no matter what happens. There is zero consideration for the amount of sheer effort, will, and constant vigilance it took to build and maintain such a state of being.
Or put another way: Inertia is a hell of a drug.
They aren't tired, they're distracted. X/TikTok/et. al. are all fire and motion mechanisms.
It's the phones, humans are being DDoSd. We need government intervention against many aspects of modern technology.
The profit motive works when it comes to reducing manufacturing costs and passing some of that on to consumers through the beauty of competition. It doesn't work so great when it's X training a transformer model to maximize the amount of time you spend doom scrolling so they can feed you gambling advertisements.