The civilized world just quietly passed the anniversary of a false messiah making a royal arse of himself.
Founding a multi-billion dollar corporation with stolen resources, Bill Gates, philanthropist with a heart of gold at large, had dropped a new initiative wherein he would kindly share 100,000 chickens with families living in extreme poverty around the world. He even wrote a blog post about it, and it remains loaded to the brim with unabashed ignorance, deeply insulting the greater portion of the global population living in rural settings.
A variety of stenographer commercial media webzines were commenting in favor of the story, but not one seemed to have had the stones to call the gambit of Gates out for what it was. While Gates purports to know about chickens and what their upkeep requires, he clearly does not. I myself have worked with chickens however, and have even built several chicken coups over the years for friends. Bill Gates is an idiot for multiple reasons found in his blog post, and I hope to share with my readers what other voices dare not. Such as acknowledging the blunt fact of basic corporatism callously screwing up all chances for such an endeavor as his proposal, for starters.
Here in the United States, the self-proclaimed most exceptional of first-world nations, we are informed that those of our fellow citizens living in extreme poverty can find more options than do their equivalents in other nations. I have an aunt who owns and operates a bed and breakfast establishment in northern Kentucky. It took her over a year of rigamarole to attain the proper legal permissions to sell her own farm-fresh eggs, produced on the same property, for her guests. And she has actually before worked as a campaign organizer for U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell, so it is not like she could ever qualify for a label of poverty. If poor people in America have better chances than elsewhere, and if non-poor people in America find difficulty in something as simple as establishing an environment for raising chickens, then what realistic chances would the extremely impoverished hold?
Presuming someone can afford a business license enabling them to sell eggs and/or live chickens and/or chicken meat, housing chickens demands space, and I suspect that most persons living in extreme poverty are not land-owners. If chickens are kept in cages with minimal space then a number of regulatory agencies and NGOs would be waiting in the wings to pounce with all manner of charges and fines because chickens are people too. If chickens are allowed to roam free-range, then even more space is called for, with property taxes and the like to also contend with. Additionally, many regions have zoning restrictions against at-home businesses (even against owning livestock in certain neighborhoods), but should this be avoidable then what would the yuppity neighbors say to the not to be underestimated smell of the ever-accumulating quantities of chicken feces? Or to a yard of healthy grass quickly disappearing and transforming into dirt and poop under the activity of free-range hens? What would they say to the crowing roosters conducting themselves faithfully each and every sunrise throughout the year? Returning to the business license, what about certification and maintaining the medical well-being of the chickens? And the grains fed to chickens may not cost much, but it still costs, especially for people who can barely afford to feed themselves.
Did Gates really give any thought to this at all? Even in the rustic environs of the most third-world of nations, could the extremely impoverished be able to maintain the resources to properly raise and sell healthy chickens while also contending with hungry predators ranging from stray mutts to egg-sucking snakes to outright chicken thieves, and all enough to become captains of their local industry? Yes, chickens are simple creatures who largely entertain themselves, but caring for any life requires more thought and consideration than the almighty Bill Gates evidently put into this plan of his.
His wife Melinda Gates even wrote her own blog post, to help back up his sexist claim that raising chickens is a woman’s job. Many romantic couples enact the axiom of opposites attracting, but it would appear as though Bill and Melinda seem to share such traits as being insulting and offensive and decidedly unworldly. Having never conceivably worked in their respective lives, they feel entitled to inform the unwashed masses exactly how to go about becoming bourgeois. They serve as fine examples that grandest wealth is only obtainable through blind luck or rampant villainy, not intelligence, and certainly not a hard day’s work.
Flattering the chickenshit flying from their mouths accomplishes nothing but the accumulation of brown on noses.