Is it possible to replace the fort embark flavor text with this?
Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, and fellow Americans:
Tonight we meet at an urgent time for our country. We continue to face an economic crisis that has left millions of our neighbors jobless, and a political crisis that’s made things worse.
This past week, reporters have been asking, “What will this speech mean for the President? What will it mean for Congress? How will it affect their polls, and the next election?”
The millions of Americans who are watching right now, they don’t care about politics. They have real-life concerns. Many have spent months looking for work. Others are doing their best just to scrape by -- giving up nights out with the family to save on gas or make the mortgage; postponing retirement to send a kid to college.
These men and women grew up with faith in an America where hard work and responsibility paid off. They believed in a country where everyone gets a fair shake and does their fair share -- where if you stepped up, did your job, and were loyal to your company, that loyalty would be rewarded with a decent salary and good benefits; maybe a raise once in a while. If you did the right thing, you could make it. Anybody could make it in America.
For decades now, Americans have watched that compact erode. They have seen the decks too often stacked against them. The question is, What are we on Capitol Hill going to do about it? After four years of searching, I have found the answer.
The Moon. The answer is the Moon. Now Bear with me;
The United States just sent another multimillion-dollar shuttle out into space to do God knows what. Yet all the while, back here on Earth, men and women are living so far below the poverty line that they can't even obtain the most basic of necessities, let alone ride aboard the Curiosity Mars Rover out of our planet's atmosphere.
It's a travesty, really.
Every time NASA launches a shuttle, it's $450 million right up God's great blue chimney. Think of all the good that money could do if it were instead used to put disadvantaged inner- city youths into orbit. Or how many single pregnant mothers struggling to get by that money could strap into a large, spinning gyroscope that tests the effects of g-force on the human body. Or what a difference we could make for our countless homeless citizens, who more than anything else need a space station to call their own.
We cannot, as a country, justify sending our elite, middle-class, Cal Tech–educated astronauts into space while there are so many who spend each day wondering where their next hot meal will come from or where they're going to sleep tonight or whether they'll ever do a space walk without having to first stand in some humiliating, government-run unemployment line.
I spoke to an economically disadvantaged child the other day—we'll call him Calvin—and he had never tasted a tube of dehydrated chicken. Not even once. I tried to explain to him what it was and that it had been to the moon, but his life is so different from mine or yours that he had no context in which he could understand what I was saying. That's the point we've gotten to. That's how bad it's become. All I could do was look at him and shake my head and wonder how we can even call ourselves Americans anymore.
Because we live in two Americas now: The America for those who are trained as pilots or engineers and eventually become astronauts who go on missions in space, and the America for the poor.
The time to put our most vulnerable and our most needy in space is now. We can't keep running from this problem, hoping it will go away. They have just as much of a right to live in dignity and urinate in a specially designed suit built to withstand incredible heat and cold while protecting the human body from violent and sudden changes in air pressure as anyone else.
Look, I'm perfectly aware that some scientific good has come from spending billions and billions of dollars on NASA over the years, and the brave astronauts who pioneered the program should be applauded. But the Cold War's over, people, and NASA's usefulness has run out. So let's look to the future and start moving money from this obsolete relic of the past into a meaningful, fully operational space program for the poorest 1 percent of Americans.
In other words: a space program for the people who need to be shot straight into an intense, burning horizon of hope most. My fellow Americans, I present the solution to our Economic Crisis. I present the Bay12 Space Program.
And for you hardcore businessmen and capitalists out there, there's a practical application in this, too: Why pay highly trained astronauts to go to the International Space Station and test the effects of unfiltered ultraviolet radiation on bacteria when there are plenty of eager young teenagers who would jump at the chance to do the same thing at a cost that wouldn't break the bank?
Think about it.
I'm not talking about a handout, I'm talking about a hand up—up 20,000 miles into space, where our nation's most desperate and destitute can gaze down on this big blue marble ball of clouds and dreams and be inspired to lift themselves out of poverty.
President Kennedy once said, “Our problems are man-made –- therefore they can be solved by man. And man can go as loud and as big as he wants.”
These are difficult years for our country. But we are Americans. We are tougher than the times we live in, and we are bigger than our politics have been. So let’s meet the moment. Let’s get to work, and let’s make the year two thousand and sixteen what our younger seven year old selves thought it would be when we first thumbed through those pulp sci-fi magazines from the grocer: A "Totally radical future-world with three-breasted green space women and lazers, and, like, Bladerunner but cooler"!
(Thunderous Applause)
Let's blast the 99% to the moon!
(Applause Continues)
Thank you very much. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America. Don't forget to vote!
~ The President
Author
Topic: Bay12 Space Program (Read 17221 times)