At 10:38 7/13/97 -0500, you wrote:
>Although it's exciting that a woman/women are invloved in the Mars
>expedition, I also think that it's important to look critically at the
>expedition istelf, and at space "exploration" in general. To me, it is very
>much a problem that billions of dollars are being spent on this, while at
>the same time, there are more & more people living out in the streets,
>education & arts funding are being cut, healthcare too expensive for large
>numbers of people, etc. And I'm only talking about the U.S.
Very true. But where do you think all those billions of dollars get spent?
Some, at least, go to salaries -- keeping people employed -- (including
the janitors who clean the buildings and the truckers who bring in the
raw materials). Those salaries generally go to food and clothing and
education for the children, etc. Certainly, big business keeps a lot of
the money (which should go in part to the stockholders, many of whom are
NOT the few enormously wealthy); but none of it leaves the earth.
When the space program got gutted, years ago, lots of highly trained
engineers were looking for jobs and their families were in trouble.
(I worked in a second-hand bread shop. These men were begging for jobs
as driver-salesmen on bread routes; their wives were shopping with
food stamps.) Yes, the better their training, the sooner they did get
appropriate jobs; but still, they were taking jobs that less-well
trained people could (should?) have had.
If some money were spent on proper treatment facilities for the
mentally ill (which covers quite a few of those homeless on the
streets, honestly -- thank Ronald Reagan), and more spent on making
real job opportunities available to many teens who can't see any
good future, I would be first to applaud. But cutting the space
program won't do it. That money won't go to 'public welfare' (which
largely hits anything that hurts the prosperous, rather than the
kind of grass-roots stuff that really helps the people who need it).
I'm for funding programs started by the people who live in the
middle of the crisis and know what's going on. It doesn't take a
great deal of money (on a government scale, that is -- a few
millions here and there) if the money gets to the people who
run the show rather than to a bureaucracy.
Ok, I'll get off my soapbox now. Sorry about that.
Martha Bartter
Truman State University
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:26 PDT