This morning, I rode my bike downtown to the bank. (exercise – healthy!) After depositing my check, I decided to stop for breakfast at the Main Street Cafe. For any readers unfamiliar with Kalamazoo, Main Street is a wonderful little breakfast and lunch joint. I don’t know if the waitress knows my name, but she calls me “honey” and always remembers what I order.

I am a creature of habits: gyro and feta omelet with a pot of coffee and a large orange juice. (cholesterol, hypertension – unhealthy! bad!) Afterward, I smoke a cigarette and read a book for a while. (lung cancer – unhealthy! bad!)

Following breakfast, I ride my bike back to my apartment (good!), which smells vaguely of stale beer. I threw a bit of a party last night. (liver disease – bad!)

As a very general rule, college students (myself included) are not the healthiest of individuals. We drink and smoke and stay up all night stressing about term papers. Fortunately for us, most of us remain dependents of our parents, and retain our insurance benefits, so long as we are enrolled as full-time students. If I keel over from lung cancer or liver disease or get hit by a truck while riding my bike (irony – good!), I will be provided with excellent, state-of-the-art healthcare.

I am sure by now everyone can tell where this article is going, eh?

Most people are not college students. Many of these people have absolutely no health coverage whatsoever.

To me, the much-publicized Healthcare Brawl 2009 seems like a bit of a no-brainer. People can’t afford cancer treatment, you

Also, Soylent Green is Grandma

say? Golly, we should probably get on that!

Of course, this is not the case.

This excellent article by Nicholas D. Kristof led me to a rather disturbing statistic. According to the National Academy of Sciences, more people die every year thanks to lack of health insurance than were killed in the 9/11 attacks. Al-Qaeda doesn’t have shit on the inefficiencies of the American healthcare system.

We threw hundreds of billions of dollars worth of missiles and fighter jets and bullets at Al-Qaeda for their actions. I wonder what we’re doing about the 18,000 annual deaths a year caused by our own inefficiency.

The media is completely fixated on the hysterics of the right wing fringe which, it seems, is too busy worrying that Obama wants to grind up Grandma and turn her into cat food. They have yet to contribute anything constructive to the debate. Those that aren’t obsessing over “death panels” are busy arming themselves to the teeth. If there’s one thing the far right does well, it’s death fetishism.

This is not to say that the Democrats are blameless. Despite overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Congress, they have so far proved unwilling (I hope not unable) to pass a bill over the heads of a rowdy, but largely hapless Republican minority.

In the meantime, 50 more people will die today because they lack any form of health coverage. In a year’s time, I will graduate from college and join the teeming ranks of the American uninsured.

Frankly, I am terrified at the depths of our inefficiency.

The US Government’s privatization of war has taken a turn for the sleazy in Afghanistan, according to this article from Mother Jones. In a letter to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, The Project on Government Oversight detailed a wide range of frat house antics perpetrated by private contractors (read: mercenaries) of ArmorGroup North America while guarding the US embassy in Kabul. According to Mother Jones, offences committed by the Government-employed mercenaries include “Drunken brawls, prostitutes, hazing and humiliation, taking vodka shots out of buttcracks.”

A typical scene in the American Embassy?

That’s right. Buttshots of vodka in the US Embassy in Kabul. Of course, this sort of Girls Gone Wild behavior pales in comparison to some of the more heinous acts committed by mercenaries in government employ, most notably the 2007 massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians by trigger-happy Blackwater troopers. However, in a country as conservative and Muslim as Afghanistan, the fallout from news of ArmorGroup’s antics will hardly help with the efforts of the US Military and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to win the trust and support of the Afghan public. In the face of growing dissatisfaction with widespread corruption, and a rapidly-expanding Taliban insurgency, this news will only serve to increase already widespread resentment against those who many view as foreign occupiers.

Beyond the immediate consequences for American and ISAF soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan, these incidents highlight the folly of the increasingly popular practice of the American military of outsourcing jobs that would normally be filled by American troops to outside mercenaries. On the surface, the policy seems to make a sort of shortsighted sense. Hiring a private contractor to guard an embassy or diplomatic convoy frees up more soldiers to actively hunt insurgents and engage in combat operations. The American military is all-volunteer, with no conscripts and anemic recruitment figures. With an enormous portion of their resources devoted to fighting two wars, the military needs all the help it can get.

This highlights another problematic area in America’s military machine. Many of the men and women who sign up with corporations such as ArmorGroup and Xe (formerly Blackwater – they quietly changed their name in the midst of the PR fallout following the 2007 massacre) do so motivated by the higher wages and better benefits these companies offer in comparison to the military. The consequence of this is less oversight for these mercenaries and, judging from their affinity for bodyshots and bloodbaths, decreased discipline. The news of these incidents spreads and further ravages the reputation, not of the companies themselves, but of the American war machine and government they are associated with. In wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan, where winning favorable public opinion is paramount, these actions are completely inexcusable.

A possible solution to this problem is to raise the wages and improve the benefits offered to American soldiers. I am not advocating an increase in military spending – quite the opposite, in fact. The budget of the Department of Defense is inexcusably bloated, and an overall reduction of its spending would free up funds for other programs, such as education and healthcare. However, a readjustment of spending within the Department itself could do much to free up funds for grunts on the ground. The American military today is run by men who seem to still have one foot in the Cold War mentality of the 1980s. Multibillion dollar B-2 bombers and crackpot plans to shoot down missiles with laser beams from space are of little use to soldiers fighting a guerilla war in underarmored Humvees. Clearly, some fiscal soul-searching is needed in the Pentagon.

This trend of privatization of the military is deeply worrisome. And it doesn’t merely extend to the Department of Defense. Privatization extends to a shockingly diverse array of aspects of American life, including the prison system. This raises tough questions. Corporations exist for the benefit of themselves and their shareholders, not the American government or its foreign policy. Who are these people really serving? If we are going to employ them, can we at least implement some sort of effective oversight policy? Satisfactory answers to these questions are conspicuously absent.

“Mystery creates wonder, and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.” -Neil Armstrong

On July 20^th 1969, Man first stepped upon the moon.  Around 237 thousand miles away, Americans sat captivated as they watched the product of American ingenuity, determination, and scientific prowess.  This mission and the five after it would put a dream inside the minds of a generation; many would pursue that dream and become the scientists, engineers, and astronauts of today.  Unfortunately, these dreams have been waning for some time in our America.

NASA is expected to take in some 18.6 billion dollars in 2010 amidst rising criticism that a space program, particularly one exclusively financed by the government, is unnecessary.  The lack of clear tangible benefit or patriotic mission leads to opponents on both the left and the right.  Those 18 billion dollars could purchase two new Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carriers, not to mention ease rising social security costs or the national debt.  President Bush’s “Vision for Space Exploration” policy announced on January 14^th 2004 has done little to convince Americans of the benefit of space exploration and research and even received criticism from Buzz Aldrin and others in the field for having misplaced priorities.  The proposed manned return to the moon would be costly and return little of value.  Though helium-3 has been proposed as a nuclear fusion fuel source, it remains beyond our current technology and does not pose a realistic reason for a new moon landing.

In the 1960s, NASA expended between 20 and 25 billion on the Apollo program (perhaps equivalent to more than 135 billion today).  Thousands of American scientists and engineers worked with one goal in mind, but in the process of doing so they created hundreds of new technologies that have become part of our everyday lives.  While not on the same budgetary level as the Apollo program, the creation of the space shuttle and the International Space Station has also led to many offshoots.  LEDs, artificial limbs, firefighting equipment, and many others have had substantial influence from the work of NASA.  Any new program, even to the moon, would lead to new discoveries.

It is Mars that poses the biggest bang for our buck.  While the two rovers currently on the surface—Spirit and Opportunity—are still active, a manned mission would return significantly more information than the robots ever could.  Humans could easily accomplish in a week what it took the robots, given their limited mobility and communications lag, achieved in their five years of service.  Mars is the first real step towards permanent off-world habitation.  With water near the poles and gravity stronger than the Moon’s, a long-term stay should be simpler.  Managed correctly, such a mission could also be a boon for the average American.  Instilling a new passion for the sciences would help counter the downward trend in science and math literacy in American schools.

Yet as much as science fiction has convinced me of the importance of space exploration for the future of mankind, it has not blinded me to the fact that it is not simply a lack of a dream that leaves American students with such abysmal scores in math and science.  In 2006, American 15 year olds scored far behind the average for students of prosperous Western European and Asian nations, particularly Germany and Japan.  We must solve our problems at home before venturing out and the best way to go about this is not the funneling of billions of dollars into the space program.  Education in America needs direct investment and reform.

I am by no means making an argument against space exploration, and hope that you, the reader, may be persuaded that it is something worth fighting for.  We simply do not have an environment in the United States in which any odyssey to the Moon or Mars would have a significant effect.  NASA ought to be held on the backburner while more pressing matters take precedence.  If we can make headway on our educational deficit, the space program could regain its importance.