America has just sent a $700 million space probe on a 3 billion-mile journey to Pluto, according to a Jan. 20, 2006 edition of USA Today. In the same edition was a story about a fight among nomads in Kenya that killed 38 people. It was a “battle for livestock” between Ethiopian and Kenyan nomads in drought stricken northern Kenya, “where tribes are desperately searching for food and water to survive.” Later in the day, I read in the A Common Place Mennonite magazine that water scarcity is a “crushing problem” in northern Africa. And much of the water that is there is not pure. This causes scores of deadly diseases, especially among children… So to juxtapose this: We’ve just spent $700 million on a space probe to Pluto (and billions of dollars on NASA missions to Mars to, among other things, see if there has ever been water on that planet); while meanwhile on this planet people are so desperate that they are killing each other over food and water and parents are watching their children die by the scores because they have no alternative than to give them impure water. This would beg the question: How far would the billions of dollars America is spending on space exploration go toward providing more food, cistern systems to collect clean rain water, solar ovens to boil water, whole village water filtration systems… for the Third World? Note: Our platform calls for ending the Space Program at this time because we think that the money could be much better spent on humanitarian causes. What’s more, right next to the article on the Pluto Probe, there was a story about space clutter making a mess of the Earth’s orbit. Part of the article reads: “More than 9,000 pieces of space debris are orbiting the Earth, a hazard that can only be expected to get worse in the next few years, according to NASA scientists.” Our paradigm with the space in the Earth’s orbit, I’d have to assume, is that its “huge.” So what’s a little “junk?” Probably the same way we percieved the vastness of the oceans — when we first started dumping “junk” in them.