Understanding how to make America better in ways that also benefit the least of us requires greater knowledge on all of our parts regarding the enormous challenges and limitations that we are currently faced with. This is especially true if we genuinely wish to play a supportive role in delivering the poor out from under the burdens of crime, drugs, exploitation, mental crisis, misery, and violence.
To a degree, this human predicament reflects a gross failure on the part of the American system, especially for people of color, when it comes to public education, employment opportunity, medical and mental health, and adequate housing and public safety throughout many large communities all across the country.
As a nation, we have a ongoing propensity to practically ignore the very processes that greatly diminish hope, ensure multigenerational poverty, increase exposure to a lifestyle of criminal activity, and which continue to produce rising numbers of unskilled workers.
Why is it that we are more apt to advocate for the provision of food, financial aid, and other forms of material support to developing nations yet can readily turn our backs on those most in need right here at home? We continue to promote a useless legacy of nation building elsewhere and yet we don't seem to have mastered the ability to defeat despair and dreadful conditions for our own people right here at home.
Is it just me or are we totally unfounded in the way that we prefer to see and portray our collective selves to others. I think that this glaring dichotomy actually makes all of us look like we are full of poop. When was the last time that the United States of America was ranked as world class in feeding its poor, in the quality of the public education that it provides to its citizenry, in reducing teen pregnancy and suicide, in preventing bullying, homelessness or alcohol and drug abuse among our people of all ages? Wouldn't you agree with me that it is high time that we got to the bottom of this dilemma?
Why is our government spending millions and millions of dollars in an effort to find an inhabitable place in outer space for a hand full of people to live on when there are literally hundreds to thousands of people within 5 miles of most of us who do not have a safe place to sleep tonight? This makes absolutely no sense to me. I think that it is time that we started demanding a real change in how we go about setting our priorities, along with establishing who should really be involved in setting them for the millions of people who today are left feeling mostly as though they have no influence, no say, and little if any bit of a promising future to still speak of.
If you believe that you need not do anything to solve
the world's problems, you are one of them.
- Anonymous
In 2005 NASA had a budget of $16.2 billion; this includes not only the human spaceflight division, but also other engineering projects, and science funded by NASA. The total federal spending budget in 2005 was on the order of $2 trillion ($2000 billion), making the NASA share 0.8% of the budget.
We have gotten ourselves into quite a predicament. Yes indeed. It's time for us to go deeper in our problem solving in the hope of producing a more favorable outcome.
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