in which the author justifies his position by citing a poet whom I've never heard of who goes on: ---------------
While there are still humanitarian crises such as that in Syria, nobody can justify vast spending on rocketry experiments. That point was made plain in 1970 by the poet Gil Scott-Heron, on his record Whitey On the Moon, which criticized the US for spending millions to send men on a pointless moon adventure while the country’s inner cities languished:
I can’t pay no doctor bills
But whitey’s on the moon
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still
While whitey’s on the moon.
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Somewhere in my
collection of memorabilia is a job application for the position of cargo
specialist on the space shuttle. The education part starts off by
asking where the applicant got his or her FIRST bachelors degree, and
extends to asking about any post doctoral work. When whitey was walking
on the moon there were a whole bunch of us less educated crackers
cheering him on from back down here. If this blues singer is bummed that
he didn’t get to go, all he had to do was go back to school, major in
engineering, learn to fly a plane, preferably jets, and work his way up
the hierarchy of test pilots to the position of astronaut. It’s easy and
I guarantee you don’t have to be white.
To paraphrase a man who shall remain nameless, “There are those who go to space, and there are those who pay doctor bills. You pay.”
To paraphrase a man who shall remain nameless, “There are those who go to space, and there are those who pay doctor bills. You pay.”
2 comments:
Perhaps you remember the 'rickets not rockets' protests. It had a decidedly racist flair since it seems the negro has a higher incidence of the disease therefore the space programs were conspiracies to keep them folks down. An even more foolish aspect of the protests was the lament that the money was actually leaving the planet, never to be seen again.
You just don't get it.
The issue isn't how qualified or unqualified anyone is to do anything, the issue is that "Whitey" owes blacks and hasn't paid up yet so any time any money is spent that isn't going into black pockets, that's a problem.
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