With everybody complaining that the school newspaper doesn’t do enough to educate students on international happenings, I’ve decided to take it upon myself to fill the void. Whenever I get the chance (or feel like it), I’ll explore a globally significant event and explain why you shouldn’t care about it anyway.

About two weeks ago, the nation of North Korea created a minor uproar in the international world when they launched a new missile, The Taepo Dong I. This new missile is a marked improvement over their old delivery system, which relied heavily on Ryder trucks.

During the test flight (which was rumored to carry a PBS satellite), the Taepo Dong happened to pass over Japan en route to a watery grave in the Pacific Ocean.

I’d like to believe North Korea and chalk the whole incident up to bad aim. Unfortunately, the U.S. and Japan are upset over the whole deal and are getting ready to throw the book at North Korea.

I can understand Japan being perturbed. If someone were to launch a PBS satellite over my house, I’d be downright pissed! I watched enough “Sesame Street” and “3-2-1 Contact” as a kid.

However, the missile flying over Japan is only part of the problem. Not only does Japan have to deal with the embarrassment of not knowing the rocket buzzed downtown Tokyo (they only learned about it after our military told them), but they have the additional problem of the satellite transmitting re-runs of “Sesame Street” and “Sherry Lewis and Lambchop.”

Now, the missile launch has the U.S. worried for reasons that are not quite so apparent.

The launch may look like an attempt by North Korea to test a missile system capable of carrying nuclear weapons to places that are important to us (like Japan). If North Korea were to put a nuke on that rocket, we would have to go without Sony televisions and Nintendo 64s for a long time.

But look beyond that. The fact that the rocket was carrying a PBS satellite shows that North Korea is intent on staking a claim in the lucrative public broadcasting sector. Our entire way of life could be threatened!

That’s if the rocket actually worked. This brings us to my second point.

The two most recent attempts by our country to launch rockets have involved some very loud and expensive fireworks off of Cape Canaveral. The commercial rocket was insured. The spy satellite was worth an estimated one billion dollars of taxpayer money.

We all know that the Asian economy became powerful solely because of their ability to make cheap knock-offs of our quality products. Whatever we could build, they could make cheaper. So now the U.S. is faced with another economic disaster in the realm of exploding rockets.

Why would Norway pay us when North Korea could blow up rockets for a lot less?

Our attention should be focused on finding more cost-effective ways to blow up expensive satellites. Otherwise, we risk losing billions of foreign dollars to competitors.

In fact, only a week ago the Ukraine managed to blow up ten satellites at once.

With this in mind, perhaps you should pay more attention to the launching of rockets and their satellite payload. Could you imagine more channels having PBS and Animal Planet before we ever get “South Park?”

Aaron Woell is a junior in political science from Bolingbrook, Ill.