She turned to her father and asked: “Is it harder to live in space? Or in Antakya?”

We have finished the first month of 2024, and yet nothing has changed. This is because the Turkish public has become very accustomed to their own needs not being prioritized.

The priority of those in power: Sending a Turk to SPACE,

The priority of the Turks: Price hikes and making ends meet.

In the week when the new minimum wage, which barely clears the hunger threshold, was announced as 17 thousand TL, and while retirees could not even dream of what they would do with the new pension determined as the base salary of 10 thousand TL, Turkey sent the first Turk into space.

Not with its own spacecraft, but with another country's spacecraft. Not from its own space base, but from someone else's space base. Not with its own resources, but by cutting from the mouths of the Turkish people…

The Turkish public has become so accustomed to their needs not being prioritized that, without worrying about how they would make ends meet with 17 thousand TL that would melt away against inflation within a few months, they watched the first Turkish astronaut sent to space with sparkling eyes.

The first words of the first Turkish astronaut in space were: “The future is in the skies.”

Yet, the 17 thousand TL minimum wage determined by the new hike was only enough for a father to buy a round-trip plane ticket for his family of 4 with his entire salary. As for the retiree deemed worthy of a 10 thousand TL base salary, they could not even dream of flying.

The priority of those in power was to move up in the world league. The criteria for this could not be a high minimum wage, finding a solution to unemployment, providing employment for the youth, standing on one's own feet with one's own resources, or increasing the welfare level of the people.

They launched the first Turkish astronaut into space. The moment of launch was watched with enthusiasm on giant screens set up in Kızılay Square. In the square where a large crowd gathered, the countdown was performed in unison and with enthusiasm. In a video message released to his people, the President said: “We are stepping into the second century of our Republic, the century of Turkey, with the first manned space mission we have ever carried out. We are sending one of our citizens to space for the first time to inspire our children whose dreams do not fit into the world.”

At that moment, a family trying to survive among the ruins of the city once called Antakya, which was destroyed by the earthquake, was watching these enthusiastic moments on their small television in a container.

The street where they had spent their lives no longer even had a name. Because no help arrived in the first three days of the earthquake, they had pulled out the bodies of their relatives with their own hands. For the last few months, they had considered the happiness of moving from a tent to a container a reason for gratitude, and they had managed to fit a small TV into a container stuck in mud overflowing from drains along with rainwater, watching the first Turkish astronaut's journey to space.

The 10-year-old little girl turned to her father and asked curiously:

“I wonder if what the earthquake destroyed can be seen from space?” “Is it harder to live in space, or in Antakya?”

Tears welled up in the father's eyes. He looked out the small window of the container at his hometown that was no longer there… At that moment, these sentences scrolled across the bottom of the screen: “55 million dollars were paid for the Turkish astronaut's space journey”…

Let us end our article with hope;

Only if we become a public that can calculate the opportunity cost of priorities can we change everything!