Perfect World

    PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service, credits a sponsor, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with a motto that says "Dedicated to the idea that all people deserve the chance to live a healthy and productive life."
     I listen to NPR because I really hate having my intelligence (see Rocket Science blog) insulted by stupid radio commercials.  Also, I can get titillated from shocking news stories, then share gory details without guilt.  Oh, by the way, did I mention I heard it on NPR?  So you know it's true.  Plus, it's fun to wonder what some of the broadcasters are like in "real" life, that is, life outside the radio personality world.
     The first several times I heard "Dedicated to the idea that all people deserve the chance to live a healthy and productive life.", I didn't hear it.  You know.  I heard it, but I didn't hear it.  I wasn't listening, I was filtering.  It was just white noise, an ad on NPR - which is NPR because it doesn't have ads - it has affiliates, which have annual fund drives, which are sometimes more annoying than ads, because they bust out the guilt hammer to get me to send money to KJZZ, my local station.
     But one day, the devil's advocate in me thought, "Wait a minute.  That's an ideal that sounds so irrefutable, someone needs to refute it."  So I stepped up to the plate: it was my turn at bat.
     To be fair, there is a sort of disclaimer that it's only an "idea" that all people deserve the chance to live a healthy and productive life.  It seems to me a pretty good idea, but apparently nature doesn't think so.  Communism seems like a pretty good idea, too, it just doesn't work.  You know that pie we wanted to cut up into equal sized pieces and distribute to everyone equally?  Half of it just got eaten by some of the distributors, so now our ten-inch pie is a five-inch pie.  And there's the rub.  Human nature, being what it is (that's right, what it is, not what I'd like it to be), won't allow communism to work in practice.  Of course this is a bit of an oversimplification, but but you get the idea.
     Many ideas turn out to be ideals, and it's good to work toward an ideal, which is what I think the Gates Foundation is up to.  But if we think it's going to happen before some river can carve another Grand Canyon, we're setting ourselves up for disappointment.  If Mr. Hitler had gotten his way, and achieved his ideal of racial purity, the world would eventually be populated by a bunch of Aryan mutant freaks, the result of too much inbreeding.
     If you search the Gates' Foundation's website for "Dedicated to the idea that all people deserve the chance to live a healthy and productive life," you won't find it.  Instead, at the top of the page, on the same level as the name of the foundation, the motto ALL LIVES HAVE EQUAL VALUE appears, just like that, in capital letters.  Now there's an idea I find irrefutable.