Not Nearly As Interesting As Geneva

I have to be awake (again) in a couple hours, but whatever. I feel like writing this now. I just read an article about how John McCain criticized Barack Obama for supporting a 3-million-dollar projector for the Adler Planetarium, and I was reminded of my own childhood when, at least once a year, our elementary school got its own planetarium.

In I think third, fourth and possibly again in sixth grade, my elementary schools played host to a giant inflatable dome that was set up inside the gym and was a huge model of the night sky. Thinking back on it, that sort of thing must've been both tremendously expensive and rather risky for schoolteachers, who are burdened enough just teaching math, reading and writing, much less astronomy and stellar cartography.

Nonetheless, the traveling planetarium was rather amazing. It's been something that, granted, has sat in the back of my mind until now - but what about the rest of my elementary school colleagues? Surely one in the hundreds of them must've been truly moved, not simply interested, by what was presented in that inflatable dome, with its pinpoints of light symbolizing the night sky and the constellations (which, I must add, were presented not only in the traditional Greco-Roman configurations, but also as how the East Asian and Central American cultures perceived them - AND from the North and South hemispheres). And no doubt, amongst all of the students who've ever encountered this traveling science show, at least a handful of them must've gone on or are going on to become astronomers, astrophysicists, astronauts, or some related position.

True, it is important that we secure the national financial sector and stabilize the banking industry. Without creative minds to solve the problems of today and tomorrow, we'd be... well, screwed. But without inspiring the children of today, and giving them the opportunities to learn and explore all that they can, in creative and wonderfully innovative ways, don't we lose something fundamentally more important?