A Fighting Man

“John’s Bar and Grill” is how my brother answered his phone last night.  The phone near his bed where he is hooked up to oxygen and a breathing machine in the new hospice in Tucson.

To our shame, my husband and I found it remarkable that brother Jay is so positive and upbeat.  He is a career military man, a soldier.  No warrior gives up; he fights the enemy to his last breath.  Jay is being a true soldier.

Stout heart won fair lady.  His wife Rose is determined, focused, loving, thinking only of her husband.  She shows up for him dressed as if going to a wedding or a fancy dinner party.  Hair, makeup, dress, high heels, jewelry.  She also is positive and upbeat in his presence.  She is a wife worthy of a warrior. She will not have her man fighting his last battle thinking he married a wimp.  She is there to support and encourage, to stand beside him.

Jay’s military buddies have been coming by to see him.  They talk about work, not about the obvious.

Jay is thinking of life, of others, of his duty.  His situation and attitude  resemble battle scenes written by Kipling about British soldiers pinned down by overwhelming enemy forces in India.  There is not a word of self-pity, regret, no bemoaning fate, no blaming other people or God.  What Jay presents is cheerful steadfastness while doing what God has set before him to do.

God Bless him.

For October 5th

Thou workest perfectly. And if it seem

Some things are not so well, ’tis but because

They are too loving-deep, too lofty-wise,

For me, poor child, to understand their laws:

My highest wisdom half is but a dream;

My love runs helpless like a falling stream:

Thy goodness embraces ill, and lo, its illness dies!

-George Macdonald , Diary of An Old Soul

Father of the True Green Revolution

Norman Borlaug died at age 95 of cancer complications this past weekend.

He was the living scientist I most admired.

From a WSJ article:

“Norman Borlaug arguably the greatest American of the 20th century died late Saturday after 95 richly accomplished years. The very personification of human goodness, Borlaug saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived. He was America’s Albert Schweitzer: a brilliant man who forsook privilege and riches in order to help the dispossessed of distant lands. That this great man and benefactor to humanity died little-known in his own country speaks volumes about the superficiality of modern American culture.”

Due to Borlaug, my 70’s undergraduate classes in international agriculture were full of hope on the one hand, because his pioneering research in plant breeding led to underdeveloped nations being able to feed their growing populations instead of suffering mass starvation,  and cynicism on the other, since shorter plant stems and use of chemical inputs brought their own problems.

But as he is quoted in the WSJ: “Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was “inappropriate” for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists “have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things.”

In July he had written an editorial to the Wall Street Journal.  An excerpt:

“Even here at home, some elements of popular culture romanticize older, inefficient production methods and shun fertilizers and pesticides, arguing that the U.S. should revert to producing only local organic food. People should be able to purchase organic food if they have the will and financial means to do so, but not at the expense of the world’s hungry—25,000 of whom die each day from malnutrition.”

The WSJ obituary and  this article are best at describing who the man was.

Norman Borlaug on Why Famines still exist.  Hint: it is not because there is too little food.

Hope

The Butterfly Circus

Thanks to Kyriosity (on the blogroll).

Some Things Really Do Change

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

We’ve all heard that phrase one way or another:  the more things change, the more they stay the same.   And we can all name examples.  Politics, for one.

But enough of that.  Here are two stories showing how that phrase is sometimes not true.

When we took Isaac to college yesterday, we went early, because he wished it.  Therefore we sat in the car, in a line of cars, waiting with all the other families who listened to their first-year children who wished to come early (to beat the rush don’t you know) so they could get into their dorm rooms before everyone else.  It had been obvious to Isaac that we knew nothing about the process.  His friend Sam knew.  So we sat there for half an hour.

When we arrived at the designated unloading spot we made fun of the family which had a Hertz Rental Moving Van for their child’s stuff!  What were they thinking?  Maybe they were the first of their family ever to go to college.

After unpacking the car,  the kids got a trolley and guarded the stuff, and the parents went,  parked the car,  and walked back.

Then we all shuffled his stuff into his room, made him fill out the form detailing the degree of soundness in his room, made him unpack the two suitcases and cloth carrying bags so we could take them home, and after all this parental harassment, walked with him to the large gym where he went to his college table and got given free stuff: shirts, a backpack bag, a calendar, a planner, a highlighter, etc.  We walked around the gym looking at all the tables, ate a few bites of free food and then he walked us to the car, where we said our good-byes and he ran away.  Literally.  Smiling a Cheshire Cat smile.

It took us less than 1.5 hours.  It was now one hour into the three hours given for his designated living area to come unload.

And when we walked past the waiting-in-car-lines parking lot, guess how many cars were there, waiting?  None.  Zero.  Zip.

Huh.  What about that?

__________________

When my father got ready to go to college, in 1947, his father took him early Monday morning to the pawnbroker in downtown Rochester because my grandfather knew that the dealer gave a 10% discount on the first sale of the day.  Grandpa bought his son a used leather satchel.

Wednesday morning of that week, my grandparents dropped their youngest child and only son off on the intersection of two main roads.  It took him three days to hitchhike to Kansas State University.  The satchel was his only piece of luggage.

It didn’t seem to harm him a bit.

New Blogs on the Blogroll

One of these days I will get around to writing about books I have read in the last month or so.  Really.

One I am reading now is The Book Whisperer.   If you have children, or teach children: read it.

Donalyn Miller has a blog, too.

Watts Up with That? is newish on the blogroll, too.  It is a science blog written by a meteorologist uncovering all sorts of interesting information that tends to be covered up.

This, for example:

“Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching into the status and management of  polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by  insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.”

The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment

I

“…it is not too soon to provide by every

possible means that as few as possible shall be

without a little portion of land.  The small

landholders are the most precious part of the state.”

-Jefferson to Reverend James Madison,

October 28, 1785

That is the glimmering vein

of our sanity, dividing

from us from the start: land

under us to steady us when we stood,

free men in the great communion

of the free.  The vision keeps

lighting in my mind, a window

on the horizon in the dark.

II

To be sane in a mad time

is bad for the brain, worse

for the heart.  The world

is a holy vision, had we clarity

to see it–a clarity that men

depend on men to make.

III

It is ignorant money I declare

myself free from, money fat

and dreaming in its sums, driving

us into the streets of absence,

stranding the pasture trees

in the deserted language of banks.

IV

And I declare myself free

from ignorant love.  You easy lovers

and forgivers of mankind, stand back!

I will love you at a distance,

and not because you deserve it.

My love must be discriminate

or fail to bear its weight.

–Wendell Berry