Maggie's Farm

It's a trite old slogan now. You all know where it's from. But like most things that are truly useful, they fade into the background until they are essentially invisible, a plain sort of wallpaper perhaps; and people only point out whatever shortcomings such things have. Only Europeans are bigger ingrates than Americans. We seldom appreciate anything we have; they don't appreciate the things they have, and don't appreciate us, either.

An example: I could search the internet for half a second and come up with millions of documents, scholarly and rant-like alike, telling us all how bad the Interstate Highway System is. All the evils it generates. Try finding out the sum total of what it's added to the betterment of our country, and by proxy, the world. I submit to you that no one bothers to even attempt it, because the benefits of the thing are so enormous and so far-reaching that you couldn't even begin to quantify it. So everyone just takes the benefits of it for granted and rails about a swamp that got filled in, or pollution - a little real, mostly imaginary. But then, it's much easier to complain about your cable bill than to turn the TV off, ain't it?

I want you to read an entire blog. You heard me, the whole thing.

William Kamkwamba's Malawi Windmill Blog

I'd like to think that guy is just like me. But it would be presumptuous of me to claim it. But I'd be proud if someone said it about me, that's for sure.

I'm going to head a lot of people off at the pass right now. His accomplishments have nothing to do with Gaia-love windpower one-world eco-blathering World Bank recumbent bicycle Earth Day carbon footprint nonsense. A man, aided by friends and family, is able to use his active mind and his efforts to improve the quality of his family's life through his own exertions. That, and he is able -- and allowed-- in a small way to lay his hands on the things he needs to do it. It boggles the mind what that man could do with access to a library and a Home Depot.

Please take heed: I said library and not university. A university is now generally simply an intellectual bootcamp, where you are taught that no one needs what William, and many like him, desperately and manifestly do need; things that you take for granted because you have the dough for a 600 dollar phone toy with no inkling of how it, or anything else for that matter, gets to you. They talk a good game about helping people like William in the abstract, as part of a faceless horde. Reality intrudes quickly, though, and they don't do much of anything that helps any individual like William, and generally do a great deal to harm or hamstring him. I fear many might be sanguine about returning such as me to the local equivalent of where William is now -- reading a dogeared book in the dark, slapping at the malarial mosquitoes -- as long as they can call it "progress" on the trust-fund circuit.

Also take heed: I said Home Depot and not an Al Gore celebrity self-congratulation extravaganza. They fly over people like William and me, look out the private plane's window and say: No one needs what they want. Please have my concubine feed me another lotos blossom.

I feel better about the world because William Kamkwamba's in it. You want to help him? Start by getting out of his way.