If you’ve spent the last year having a non-stop conniption over Gov. King’s laptops-for-middle-schoolers plan, I’m not here to argue with you. (In fact, I totally agree with you on one central point – your granddaddy did not have a laptop.) All I ask is that you sit down at the nearest computer and turn it on.

If you think it’s still cute to play Technological Dummy, it’s that little button on the front marked “Power.” Or maybe “On.”

While the machine beeps to life, cast your mind back to when you were in the eighth grade. It’s mid-May. A drowsy breeze wafts through the open classroom windows, birds blithely chirp, bees add a lazy buzz. You, a healthy eighth-grader, are thinking more about the birds and the bees than about the history lesson droning out of that that teacher whose name you’ve long forgotten.

The computer’s up and running by now, so click on that thingy to connect to the Internet. Just like you do when you’re using a computer for the usual tasks like shopping or playing solitaire. This will take a minute or two, so let’s reminisce a bit more.

If you went to the eighth grade here in Maine, chances are the history lesson was American and you probably used a textbook a lot like the one Maine eighth-graders use today: “The American People – A History to 1877.” It being near the end of the year, you would have been studying the Civil War, perhaps you were on page 521, an entire page devoted almost, but not quite, completely to the Battle of Gettysburg.

Gettysburg was, you might have learned, a really big and awful battle involving Lee and some other men with beards. Lincoln gave a speech there that you got extra credit for memorizing. Though they’re not mentioned in the textbook, if you went to a swanky school with money for frills, maybe you saw a filmstrip that taught you about some people from Maine who were there. If you were paying real close attention and were able to fight off the urge to doze, you might have learned that about half of the roughly 7,000 people who died there, including a lot of people from Maine, did it for no less reason than to save this country and to save other people from slavery.

OK. So now go to that place on the Internet screen where you type in where you want to go today and type in (this is the only hard part): janus.state.me.us/quinn/gettysburg/index.html and in just a few seconds you’ll be at a Web site that’s not for shopping.

It’s a Web site for learning. Mostly for learning about the Battle of Gettysburg – learning by being absorbed in a compelling and inspiring subject through period photographs, videos of the battlefield today, maps that evolve to show the changing battle lines, recordings of the songs both sides sang around their campfires, first person accounts by generals, privates, nurses and townspeople (nothing will make you prouder of Maine than reading Chamberlain’s immediate post-battle report on the 20th Maine’s conduct at Little Round Top), colorfully biased newspaper reports from both sides and enough other amazing stuff to engross eighth-graders and adults otherwise prone to daydreaming.

There also are terrific lesson plans, plus links to lots of other Civil War resources. I’d urge you to follow them to the very clever Maine State Archives site (hurrahs to archivists Jeffrey Brown and Sylvia Sherman), but then you’d no doubt read a battle account by Augustine Thompson, who was fighting in Louisiana with the Maine 28th at the time of Gettysburg and then you’d know that a blacksmith from Rockland was a better writer than … well, never mind. There’s also something called Longfellow Links (put together by Doug DeCamilla, who teaches third grade at Longfellow Elementary in Brunswick) that will take you to more than 1,000 learning sites about absolutely everything. Basically, if you use this stuff right, you have to try to not get smarter.

Anyway, the above exercise is what the governor’s been travelling around the state this week asking people to do. Do it and I guarantee the conniptions will subside.

If you’re a state legislator – specifically a senator – the remedy’s not quite so easy. Many of you voted less than a year ago to create the $50 million technology endowment (only the interest is spent; the principal stays put) and to form an expert task force to develop a plan for its best use. You accepted that excellent plan – a marvel of problem-solving when it comes to legitimate concerns about cost and responsible use – early this year. You watched in silence as the Appropriations Committee held public hearings and work sessions on a budget that kept it intact and as the House conducted open and honest debate. Then, about a month ago, you went into some out-of-the-way closet in the State House and decided that the best way to fund your own new pet programs without raising taxes was to kill the best, risk-free chance Maine’s had in years to be a place people want to move to – not from – to raise kids and start businesses.

Or, to put a more charitable spin on it, you were so worried that Maine kids would take the laptops, sell them and blow the money on candy and other junk that you decided the best thing to do was to take the endowment money and blow it on your own junk.

Now you’re in a jam. First, there are the questions of why you’d vote for something and then try to kill it, and why you’d purposely waste the time of all those experts who served on your bogus task force. Plus, the junk – programs, if you insist – you want to buy are ongoing but the money you’re spending will only last two years, which means you’re going to look pretty silly if the world doesn’t come to an end sometime during fiscal year 2002-2003.

I’d like to lend a hand, but other than just admitting you messed up and fixing it, nothing comes to mind. I even checked the Web and found nothing to help. But then, all the sites I’ve been looking at lately are for people who want to get smarter.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.