The Prime Directive

No self-respecting GenXer with nerdy proclivities will forget The Prime Directive. I know- I included the link- but you really don't want to follow it (careful now! don't click on that link.... I.... TOLD....YOU....SO....!)

You'll get sucked into an endless wormhole of Star Trek trivia, and before you've uttered to yourself, "Who in the world has all this free-" wham you'll have checked up on at least 3 TOS (The Original Series with Kirk and Spock) episodes and reminded yourself what a tricolbalt bomb is. The Prime Directive is Star Trek's anti-imperialist/anti-colonialist subversive critique of the Vietnam War that raged when it first appeared on NBC that prohibits the likes of Capt Kirk and his crew from meddling in other cultures.

Which I brought up with M here. His whole operation is Lao, except for him, the lone Italian. So is it ethically right to try to influence the schools here using a Western perspective? Is eco-tourism the new religion we're trying to evangelize?

At the risk of pulling a Kirk (many an episode starts with someone having violated the Prime Directive, and Kirk ending up doing the same thing to fix things up, but more to make it an interesting episode), I think with the advent of Chinese logging trucks, Thai TV, Western tourists, and all kinds of other types of outside influences, offering an alternative to the environmentally unfriendly version of capitalism is not a bad thing.

Just as this country has leap-frogged telephone land lines to Star Trek communicator-like cell phones, maybe they can leap-frog parts of dirty development to cleaner alternatives. The challenge is how to help a small, village-based, agrarian society that's going through change at warp speed.