John’s Blog

For a number of years I have been going to the same resort in Jamaica. Quite a few years ago I met the man who picks up trash and plastic cups from the beach, arranges the beach lounges and chairs for the next day and then rakes the beach.

He’s a Rastafarian as is his father and was his grandfather. They eat vegetables and some fish but not meat. They don’t believe in violence or war. They don’t drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes but they do smoke marijuana. (A topic that I have planned to discuss in a future post).

He’s an interesting old guy who leaves the resort at the end of the day and walks to his home in the mountains.

He has been doing this for a long time. He told me that he had to cut off his ‘dreads’ that had reached to his knees in order to get this job.

I returned home yesterday bringing with me an interesting topic.

While sitting on the beach near the end of the day Pablito noticed that I started to pick up a plastic cup not too far from my lounge.

“No mon, leave it. I pick it up.”
I told him that it wasn’t mine and that I wouldn’t leave a cup on the beach.

“I know,” he said. ” Inside you Rasta too. But if everyone was like you who didn’t leave trash on the beach, I would have no job and my family would go hungry.”

Slobs do, after all, have a place in ‘the order of the universe”.

One last comment.
If everyone seems to know that corn biofuel costs more to produce than the equivalent energy available from gasoline, that it requires fertilizers that pollute water, that by displacing wheat production it is causing all food prices to increase, why is corn production being subsidized?

“It’s easy to find fault but difficult to find solutions.”

                                                     John W. Malenda

Friends and loyal readers, I will be “off-line” for a couple of weeks but don’t despair, I will return!

Just read this morning that  Congress and the President have decided to borrow $168 billion from China to fund the ‘tax rebate’  for us.

With that, I expect, most will be spent by us to buy products from China.

Perhaps the Columbian drug dealers would like to get in on this deal also. I’m certain that they have money to loan. 

I read on the news today that the NYPD was able to purchase three 100 pound cylinders of chlorine without identification of who was making the purchase.

…and you don’t think we need a National ID Card?

Package that with a few bags of fertilizer and a can of home heating oil and terrorists do not need to smuggle in rockets or nuclear material  in suitcases at airports.

 Let’s not be so naive. Let’s not swap a little inconvenience for our lives.