In the eyes of the masses, space is for nerds. Watching a man jump a couple of feet off the ground, spin a ball around, then put it in a basket is worth people spending billions of dollars a year on, but putting people on another planet is lame and for geeks with no life. Why else do you think they have several cable stations dedicated to sports? The simple fact of the matter is that science requires people to think and most people simply don't want to do that. Bread and circuses are all they care about.

In the great state of Tennessee, my home, the average college professor gets paid around 50-75 thousand dollars, but the head coach of UT football gets paid well over a million dollars a year. A couple of moths ago, the schools were shut down for about a week because the state ran out of money, but guess what, the athletic programs kept right on going with practice and such. It's as if the academics come a distant second to the sports programs. We can't buy new equipment for the science labs, but they'll be damned if we have to go without football. This shows something is very wrong with our society, but being a total fool is cool.

In my opinion, the first step needed to straighten out our schools, and thereby our society, is to abolish school athletics. Vast sums of money are wasted for the benefit of a very small percentage of the student body, and even then most of them have a hard time keeping a c average.

Lee, (hoping for a New Order)