In the early 1960s, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, I had a colleague who, like me, grew up on a farm in Iowa. In St. Lucia, he worked with small farmers in a remote area. He was really out there in the field, more isolated than the rest of us.
When he returned to his hilly, southeast Iowa farm, his father suggested they clear some timber from their bottomland to have more pasture for their cattle. George thought that was a good idea and immediately went to town and bought a machete.
“Gosh darn,” his father told me later, “I thought it was a good idea for George to go to St. Lucia and help those farmers get ahead, but now he comes home and wants to set me back 200 years.”
Sometimes I think technology developed in a first-world country...
