Claire+B’s+OpEd+Article

__Pluto Demoted to a Dwarf Planet __   I don’t know about you, but ever since I was born, I was familiar with Pluto being one of our prized planets in the solar system. That is, until 2006.  This planet has been deprived of its rights. It has an orbit around the sun. It is round in shape. Maybe it’s a little bit small. The only thing that makes Pluto different is that it has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, meaning there is still debris in the area it spins around, unlike the other planets. What about the Trojan asteroids that orbit Jupiter; or dust? Wouldn’t that give us, well, 0 planets total?  What does even that matter? We should not discriminate Pluto. I don’t believe it matters that it has other little rock friends floating around with it in the Kuiper belt. When Pluto was discovered in 1930, there were no rules about what could and couldn’t be a planet. How could that have been known in the 1930s? That’s right. It couldn’t.  It is not fair that scientists have taken the title of Pluto away and given it a pitiful name: “Dwarf Planet.” What does this mean to human kind? All of a sudden, if you are the least bit different from the norm, you shall be cast out to the outskirts of the world. Literally.  If you ask me, the name “dwarf” has a negative connotation, at least to the public at large. From Pluto to dwarfs, I think there’s just too much Disney floating around.  We need to stop this discrimination. Pluto has always been my favorite planet, and I’m not just about to let anything change that. Size doesn’t matter! Neither does company.