Fading Stars

14 September marks just yet another example of truly great human beings dying, only to be overshadowed by a big name doing the same.

You probably have heard that actor Patrick Swayze lost a fight with cancer earlier today. Because of this, you may not have noticed that a man more important and consequential than a man who held film superstar status during the 1980s also passed on to the great hereafter. In fact, you probably had never heard of him.

Nobel Laureate and scientist, Norman Borlaug, died hours before. The man made massive inroads in genetic engineering, leading to his development of a highly productive strain of wheat. While bloviating opportunists were blowing hot air about starvation around the globe, especially on the continent of Africa, Borlaug was in the laboratory doing something about it. His brilliance and hard work saved easily millions of people from wasting away through long, painful deaths from starvation, and when he was given the Nobel Peace Prize it was thought that the lives he saved were upwards of 1,000,000,000 (for the numerically challenged, that's one billion.)

Even as groups like Greenpeace whipped up the winds of sensationalism to stoke the fire of political opportunism to destroy genetically modified foods in favor of idealistic, utopian and cripplingly inefficient and unreliable organic farming methods, Borlaug soldiered on. No one in my recent memory has done more for the human cause than Norman Borlaug (1914-2009).

Even if Red Dawn was a great action-propaganda film, Borlaug trumps Swayze. However, I bid them both requiescat in pace.