Crying

I've always had a problem with crying. Even as a nervous teenager, I cried at the drop of a hat and was very ashamed. I always assumed I would somehow grow out of it. In fact, as I get older, I get weepier. Forrest Gump for example, and not that great a movie, has reduced me to a soggy useless gasping mess every single time I have seen it, even though I have seen it before and know every single cheap manipulative twist that is coming.

I get wet-eyed at almost anything these days, music, movies, stories, and most embarrassingly, in real life when I convey good news to an employee. I really hate it that I get all misty and choked when I promote someone or give them a raise, but I do. I also get all choked up when their spouses die, or otherwise leave them, or when their kids end up on the honour roll. Even if I don't particularly like them. And people wonder why I tend to be a little standoff-ish with my staff. Folks, it is because I don't like crying.

It is part of the same energy I use when I make speeches (and I make a lot of speeches), when a choke in the voice is the sign of success, not failure, but damn, I wish I could turn it off sometimes. Most times, except when I need it. Yes, I know, it is called passion, and it is what has carried me all these years, really what I am all about. At the end of the day, I know and fully accept and expect that I am not rational, and really, never have been.

What really irks me, I think, is that I cry about the smallest most trivial treacly things, and not about the really big things that make me crazy angry, that it turns out, almost by accident, that I have dedicated my life to. I do not shed a tear, for example, for what is currently happening in Somalia or Colombia or Iraq or the Congo/Zaire; that is work (and an outrage to human conscience), those are causes for rage and action, not weeping (yet). I don't even cry (much) about the state of my marriage.

But play some crappy sentimental song about lost love or sudden joy, I'm crying like a baby and fishing for the kleenex. No, not like a baby, like a man, a man distraught. Thinking about it, I am crying right now as I type this, and how stupid is that?

If continued....

Norman Borlaug died

Norman Borlaug shuffled off this mortal coil.

The guy was simply one of the greatest men of all time. How many people can claim to have saved a billion lives? It makes Fleming look second rate (and Fleming saved my own life at least twice).

He did it with years of hard grinding test-plot and lab work; I can remember watching my father do the same thing, using a toothpick to ferry pollen from one plant to another. My dad was part of the whole Green Revolution thing, a foot-soldier in it perhaps. He didn't do much of the research, though he did some; mostly he was interested and pretty much dedicated his life to education, to assisting the third world in developing their own capacities. To building the intellectual plumbing necessary to make things possible. Making things possible for other people; that is what he was about; and in my own small way, it is what I have been about these last 20 years or so. I think he probably got it from his mom, a Depression era school-teacher; anyway, I certainly got it from him.

Idiotic Greens love to criticize industrial farming; what they don't understand was that one of Borlaug's issues was to contain farming, in order to protect forests and unblemished wilderness. The more industrial your farming, the less likely you will be to clear-cut and plant unsustainable crops in formerly wilderness areas. Industrial farming has worked out pretty good so far; much as it gets dumped on, and should certainly be kept under a lot of scrutiny, I do remember that dad, like Borlaug, was pretty high on GM. It should not be rejected out of hand.

What dad was working on, before he lost the capability to work on much of anything, was dry-lands agriculture. He was pretty sure that there were going to be serious water issues in the future, and that was pretty prescient, because Global Warming wasn't even on the horizon yet. He thought high tech, chemical intensive, zero tillage was pretty much going to be the way to go in the future, if we were going to keep everybody fed. (Never forget this about the Green Revolution guys: they weren't advocates for industrial farming per se, they were deeply concerned about keeping everybody fed. You have no idea how strongly that thought was on top of their minds.)

Now I am enough of a lefty/progressive/hippie to think that chemicals and food are a bad mix in principle, and to be deeply suspicious of industrialization of our food supply, and every time I hear about 'intensification' I get worried. But we can all learn alot from what Borlaug did: he saved something like up to a billion's people's lives, through hard science, years in the field, and extremely tedious lab & field work. (And, I am very very sure, my dad would want to add, training other people.)

God said: (Matthew 25: 35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: 36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.) I think I am pretty much on my dad's line, with what I have done with my life. More on the taking in part than the feeding part; and it looks like my son will probably beat me out on the visiting the sick thing.

If continued....