Blessed Be the Slobs
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”.
That paradox has often come to mind with me. It most frequently occurs with shopping carts. That same point was brought home to me when I was bringing one of them back into the store.
One of the “cart shaggers” said that if everyone brought back their carts he wouldn’t have a job. In a very odd way, by you being “tidy”, you are depriving another of his/her work.
If you expand that philosophy beyond the individual and extrapolate that to a nation I wonder what we’re doing as a nation at does exactly the same thing? Interesting speculation.
Puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?
This reminds us to dig a bit deeper into ourselves, our souls and motivations, even if we assume we already think before we act.
Human Cloning, I guess, would be posted here under “Ethics”. Our Congress has passed laws against the cloning of humans. The religiously committed and those without any church, even, of course, The Pope — they all see human cloning as EVIL (seen in all upper case) and they say, “Good Gawk, get that thought out of your mind!” “Change your college major from Science to English!” “Hell, stem cell research today, human cloning tomorrow!” “Protest! Make your display placards and update your marching orders; nip the idea of human cloning in the bud now, right now, immediately!.
So they say. And I say, let’s do human cloning/do research today to get the bugs out of the human-cloning process. We do need to clone human beings. I’m all in favor of cloning humans. Why?
For space travel to the distant stars, that’s why! Outer space calls, but how will Captain Joe America get anywhere, even one light-year away? He lives and will probably die when he’s maybe 70 or 90. But, wait, who steps off our space ship upon distant arrival but Captain Joe America (cloned/stored/released), grown up and ready when he’s 20 years old. Joe will be the same because meanwhile before that long future time, scientists — I should think — will be able to upload the original Captain Joe America’s mind’s contents, store it all, then download the original Joe’s mind into the cloned Joe’s (now 20 years old), and possibly then a million light-years away from Earth. Of course, this stuff needs work.
Now please think upon my argument re space travel for cloning humans; think beyond any splitting headaches. It may — can — work when needed at some distant launch time. Why not? Farfetched? Here’s a history lesson — How many centuries between the idea/detailed drawing of today’s helicopter and the date of the activation of its age-old concept? Likewise, should we do human cloning, for this possible space-travel reason? For any other reasons?
–30–
Hey Stan, what’s going on?
John, this article left me speechless. Sometimes I get carried away with preaching personal accountability and respect, but with this point of view, how would that alter the society if everyone held themselves with such high standards? I have to remind myself that everything balances itself out. For every negative thing, there has to be a positive. Thanks for keeping my mind open.
Justin [Cerebrl]
Justin, What is the opposite of a black hole out there in space?