Hope.

Make sure you have the audio on. Click here. I haven't read The Audacity of Hope. I figure it's a 'blah blah blah (vote for me) blah blah blah', and I have better things to do with my time than peruse some emotional appeal to my vote. That and I'm illiterate, so I can't read it.


Let me paint you a picture. Africa. It's not all jungles and huts, people in loincloths or 20 year old used t-shirts. It's cities. It's townships. It's paved roads, dirt roads, some electricity. It's a land where 'party lines' are still the mode of telephonic communication in a lot of places. Yes, some places don't have a phone.

Find some previously starry-eyed idealist that spent a time in their folly-filled youth trying to better the world by spending some time teaching in the peace corps. Hell, even ask someone who spent some time doing missionary work. If they give you a bunch of claptrap about the heathen masses and the wonder of their conversion to this random loving God or another, listen through it, then ask about what life is really like.

It's life. It's different. In some ways it's better. It's simpler in a lot of ways, even though there are some things you might not be able to comprehend. It's worse in some ways too, and some of the simplicity falls into that category too. A great deal of the educational system falls into that realm of worseness. Africa is the dark continent when it comes to education. Southern Asia is getting better by leaps and bounds as far as I can tell, dragged upward by local and regional economies (yes, a tacit statement of belief in some aspects of trickle-down theory).

By and large, Africa doesn't enjoy the same experience. In a round of new colonialism, this time economic, nation-states are being pillaged by countries hungry for raw materials. Like the countries molested for oil in the forties and fifties and given disadvantageous, long-term contracts with giant big-oil multi-nationals, African nations today effectively piss away their apparently best source of capital due to a lack of human and physical infrastructure. Big-bad-evil China has swung in and turned a blind eye to conditions that the civilized world pressures its multi-nationals to stay away from--by one means or another.

The moral of this part of the story is that what revenues these countries do get are spent on other needed (and not needed) budgetary items of interest. In most cases, it's just self-serving to the administration of the day (reference: Venezuela), and in a way very American. It's short-sighted.


Step to the page linked above. I didn't even watch the whole thing. I got to the picture where the teacher is holding a laptop up in front of the class with a page about the human eye on it. I was struck. I'd like to end that sentence with a 'with...' but I don't have the words. To borrow from Hollywood: they should have sent a poet.

I went to school in Africa. I lived in a relatively affluent country (excluding oil-rich states) yet the textbooks were, for the most part, ancient. They were remnants and cast-offs of the imperial mother (England) and better off (more advanced) countries (South Africa). While the text-book industry in this country makes me nauseous, being the racket that it is, it's a behemoth. It's a lot of money and a lot of experience. (It's also a lot of vested interests, back room negotiations, and payoffs--but we're not here to talk about that.) There's just not sufficient market pressure (and the socio-political climate for the market to work its majiks, in some cases) to make it happen.


Enter the $100 laptop. Throw it together with some sort of satellite internet (DirecWay Africa?) or other connectivity, a solar charging station, a LCD projector, and a few laptops--the thought of what could change in a generation makes me want to cry (tears of happiness). I can't say that I've ever been as hopeful about the world as I am in the face of this. Think of the change of the state of education in a generation. With Wikipedia alone, errors notwithstanding, classrooms across the continent-indeed the world-all jump to essentially the same level of access of information as US classrooms. Even peasant farmers in some backwater province of central and eastern Asia... their children herd goats with switches cut from trees by morning and learn about the wide world of ruminants... and what a ruminant is... by afternoon. In a generation... think of the expansion of their worlds.

Arguably, it may be an expansion into an appreciation for all the things they can't have, and probably won't have in their lifetimes. To this: p'sha! Ideas can lead to dreams, and dreams can lead to realities. Think of the cultural revolution in America in the sixties and the wideness of the world we live in today. Again, the DAs out there could and should point out that not all of it has been great. There's some study out there that demonstrates a positive correlation between high GDP per capita and dissatisfaction and anxiety concerning life in general. I sure as hell don't trust the government, and wonder if I have any say in the evility it skulks around perpetrating on a daily basis.

Yes, yes, yes. It's a big, mean world we live in. It's a wonderful one too, and though we often do-we shouldn't forget that. I think it is human to want what others have that one does not have-to be envious-but I think the pervasiveness and legitimacy of envy is more American a concept and identity than we might be aware, and might like. The American Dream lives, obviously, or we wouldn't have this immigration clstrfck thing going on right now. It's more living here-being poisoned by madison avenue and sleek, glossy mediums of media telling you how ugly you are and how your stuff is a bunch of crap-that takes that starry-eyed-ness away from you.

Give them a chance to know, and give them a chance to dream. If you have $400 to spend on a gift this year, buy a $100 laptop--see the site on how that particular piece of genius works out. Do without the TV or computer or whatever other thing you or some giftee doesn't need that you're going to get anyways.

Log on, and buy some Hope.

-S.W. America