5/27/10
In 1970 a man by the name of Norman Bourlag was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Bourlag came up with a process of hybridizing corn and wheat for dry or arid climates. So he was accredited with saving over 1 billion people at the time he was given this award. That number has at least doubled by now. And there are estimated to be only around 6 billion people alive today. So this man, one man, literally saved 1/3 of the planet's population. What this man accomplished was remarkable. He literally changed the world.
But I’ll tell you a secret. It wasn’t really Mr. Bourlag that saved two billion people. For all the credit he received, it wasn’t Norman Bourlag that saved two billion people. It was actually a man by the name of Henry Wallace. See Henry Wallce was Vice-President under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Henry Wallace used the power and influence of his position to put a laboratory in Mexico. This labs sole purpose was to hybridize corn and wheat for dry or arid climates. Mr. Bourlag received the credit but it was Mr. Wallace that saw the need and created the laboratory. He then put Norman Bourlag in charge of it.
But I guess if you look at it that way, Henry Wallace doesn’t really deserve the credit either. Maybe it was George Washington Carver. You know George Washington Carver, he was the peanut guy. He came up with all the different things you can do with a peanut. Well Mr. Carver studied at the University of Iowa. And at the age of nineteen he had a professor that thought so much of him that he let his six year old son go on botanical expeditions with him every weekend. And it was during these expeditions that George Washington Carver gave little Henry Wallace a vision of how plants and plant life could change the course of humanities future. It was in these little excursions that Henry Wallace saw his future.
Well that wouldn’t work either because then you would have to tell the story of Moses. Moses was a farmer in Diamond, Missouri. Moses had a wife named Susan. They were white people living in a slave state, but they didn’t believe in slavery, so they were called sympathizers. Now Susan was best friends with a black woman named Mary. And one night the KKK came shot Mary’s husband and kidnapped Mary and her one week old son, who’s name happened to be George. Well, when Moses and Susan found out what happened Moses immediately tried to make contact with the kidnapper’s. Within a day or so Moses left his home on horseback and rode several hours north to Kansas to meet with these KKK members. And on a cold January night Moses traded his horse for the one-week old George. The bandits threw Moses a burlap potato sack with the half dead infant inside. Moses put George under his shirt against his skin and walked back home with the George pressed against him. A third of today’s population was saved because one woman befriended another.
Nothing we do is insignificant.