The thing about this kind of work is that work works: Polio cases worldwide have been reduced by 99.9 percent since the Rotarians took on the disease. These are good people doing good things—no mystery, no radical scientific breakthrough, just consistent hard work by people who have nothing personally to gain by saving children from paralysis in Nigeria.
I would like to emphasize the contrast here: On one hand, we have those Americans in the Rotary clubs and others like them, who do hard things competently and with humility, dedicating years of selfless effort toward getting it right on one big thing; on the other hand, we have a class of American gadflies who are endlessly self-aggrandizing, who live only for their own status and wealth, whose only credo is “What’s in it for me?” and who are, in spite of their posturing as hard-headed realists, the most absurd gang of chiseling incompetents ever to bring such an abbreviated attention span to bear on the nation’s problems, who wreck institutions and alliances and Ebola-control programs simply because they refuse to do their homework, and who have managed to destroy more than $7 trillion in wealth in only a few days while setting fire to a system of international economic and security cooperation that was built over the course of decades by better and more capable men than these misfits could ever hope to be. The Rotarians don’t talk about politics at their meetings, but there is a politically meaningful contrast to be seen there: between the best kind of Americans and the worst kind.