Randy Travis wrote a country song and sang it and the line that stuck in my mind, "It is not what you have, It is what you leave behind when you go." The lyrics in that particular phrase have rambled on through my brain thousands of times in the last 20 years, with a bitter sweet refrain. It is sad to realize that what we leave behind us when we go is more important than what we offer while we are here and still alive. Of course he was singing about the left behind items of inheritance of the dear departed. However just yesterday I got to thinking about it in another way. What if it is just the things we leave behind that we forget?
Not only does Randy Travis sing, but he and his wife are in the hospitality business in Hawaii, or places to stay. When you think about all the hospitality industry in every major city and who works in them to clean them up after guests have departed, you may run into the movie title, "One Day Without A Mexican!" Mexican people carry the weight in the United States of jobs as clean-up personnel in hospitality, lawn care, field work, and many other entry level jobs...minimum wage earning positions. The joke in the movie or the point in the movie is that is all of them vacated their lowly positions, the United States would fall apart and not run, because they do all the tasks that everyone else does not want to do. But then lost of people who come from other countries are doing the same thing...there are just a majority of Mexicans that labor in low end jobs.
All of these folks who labor in menial task laborous jobs, such as in hotel work, rooms keepers, stadium cleaners, janitorial workers....are the first pickers of the field. Meaning that the general rule of thumb is that they get to keep whatever "anyone leaves behind." In some cases this may not be so, however, in making the point of this article, I am declaring that "the workers keep whatever they find, either under the finders keepers rule, or because they simply do not disclose lost items." Some buinesses care and others do not.
In Hotels, "what you leave behind" may not be of importance to you and it may be something that you do not care about, such as wore clothing items, or previously read books, or cast off food items, or papers, or magazines...what people cast away or leave behind is usually intended for discard or trash...that is the reason we leave things. Those things "we leave behind" are the issue and subject of theis article. We are speaking on the unimportant things we discard because we no longer want them. However, to the person who finds them, they may become very important as an asset to their earnings.
For instance, plastic bottles collected by rooms keepers in any hotel can be recycled and the earnings from this trafficking of plastic into the recycled business can be more than the rooms keepers working wage. Recycled glass bottles added to this can become another additional income. And then there is paper. If all these items are salvaged and saved from each rooms keepers rooms every day....the rooms keeper can ultimately benefit greatly from "what you leave behind." Food left in the refrigerator can also become a boon. People often do not want to carry partically used packages of food with them because they anticipate buying a whole new menu as soon as they are on the road. They may leave 40 or 50 dollars worth of food in the room, discarded in the trash. This food may not be considered totally sanitary, however a rooms keeper of international descent may feel they are shopping at a gourmet supermarket...open or unopened packages of varieties of foods just for the picking! Add that to the income of the rooms keepers. Add cast away agricultural products from field workers...grocery stores where clerks work...The Dollar Stores where items get tossed out into the trash and picked up by Trash Pickers! This backyard economy thrives! These folks who are privey to these types of situation can add considerably to their incomes.
The money off recyclables, the money off cast off food items, and the savings from cast off room items, such as beddings, pillows, linens, soaps, toliet papers, lamps, mattresses, etc., can accumulate into a wealth of dollars that are saved because these people do not have to spend their wages to get these items. Add this savings in a dollar value to their already existing dollar income....and you have an increase of money from the recycables at about an extra perhaps 200 dollars a week and from the salvaged food items about 100 a week and add that to the general income of a rooms keeper of around 300 a week plus the tips to a rooms keeper...at around an approximate 100 a week or more....and suddenly you may have a different viewpoint of the thriving UNDERGROUND economy that is part of the United States.
If you want to know why the economy is suffering, instead of looking at the "slow economic growth"...look to where the growth is thriving. Not at the top, but at the bottom of the food chain! The people who are working this country to death are the ones in the low end immigrant jobs...because some are here because they are not here legally and some are gaining incomes and not paying taxes...and milking the welfare systems with "anchor baby newborns" and fabricated monetary needs and fabricated medical needs. This "pulling down" of our once vibrant and useful country is what is creating the "great economic black hole!"
In my lifetime I have heard nothing but sympathy for these "types" of people, but they are smarter and clearer in their disciplines and daily work than all of the Fortune 500 Companies...and they know how to use the underdog systems. They know how to work Economic Gorilla Warfare! So as Randy Travis clearly sang, "It is not what you have while you are here, but WHAT YOU LEAVE BEHIND YOU WHEN YOU GO!" He was telling us something and was anyone listening?
There is an old saying that my own Mother used to sound out to me, "Another man's trash is another man's tresure!" 50 years ago I just looked at her and said, "huh?" Today her words have meaning and are worth their weight in uh, "trash!"
People cast away so many useful things. Tom Hanks used the movie title, "Cast-a-Way!" I think the message in the title is the same as Randy Travis's...It is not what you have...it is what you leave behind you when you go...and there is for certain good in doing this. By all means nature is filled with creatures that harvest the leavings of other creatures or biological processes. It is all part of the process of nature cleaning up after itself. Can we push this idea to the weather systems and global warming? In the last recent years we have observed our planet pushing its weather phenomena to the brink of recycling humans. The droughts in South Africa, the Tusnamis, the Earthquakes, the Floods, the Rains, the Hurricanes, the Tornadoes, the Volcanoes, the Fires, the Snow Melts, not to mention the effect of all of this on the Human Conciousness....the outbreaks of social warfare...on many continents. Human suffering is not a joke! People are stressed to the max and drawing on their personal beliefs in God to overcome the dispair....as human leave behind their refuge...they are entering into the system: every nuclear facility along every coast. Humans will be the first to go...and the effects of the radioactive wastes given to the earth as its inheritance or our inhabitance will be distributed for the end of all time. A beautiful living creature or planetary entity will roll over and groan as it melts back into the cosmic tide. A sad and tragic fate to our Grand Mother Earth...what have humans in total, left behind?
How have we been hospitable to our Earth, that has been our Mother, and our Host here on Earth? What do we leave behind? Is there some force of transcontinental life that will fill the void in time and space and energy? Is there some force that will pick up the cosmic trash and recycle it and make life worth something again...make it worth the doing and the living?
Humans are fighting over the rights to trash as they try to live. People fight over garbage left in Hotels, on the streets, in garbage cans, behind stores, and storm chase to find things that hurricanes blew hundreds of thousands of miles...high in the Himilayas, a man's wallet with family photo is preserved as an airborn aritifact . The address in the wallet is from Kansas. People are fighting over trash. Instead they should be fighting for the Life Of The Earth!
Friday, August 26, 2011
Saturday, January 29, 2011
The Way It Was
The Way It Was
In the year 2000....I arrived on schedule to pick up my young child from the school, however I usually allowed extra minutes before the final bell. So it was 3:05 in the hot afternoon. I walked over to the drinking fountain. I noticed off to my left a strange and unusual sight before my eyes: 8 small children, both boys and girls, 2 white females, 1 black female, 1 asian male, 2 hispanic males, 2 while males; all around the first or second grade level...all sitting or some standing out in the full hot sun on the hot tar asphalt playground at the tether and basketball area, I repeat, in the full hot afternoon sun.
They were squirming around like slow cooked worms in a fry pan. There was no teacher supervising them. I could see they were painfully and extremely uncomfortable on the hot asphalt and in that full hot sun. One little white boy kept smacking the little black girl hard on the head. One little hispanic boy kept laughing and forcring her to keep in the way of the little white boy that was hitting her. One little white girl, dressed in a thin fabric blouse and pants, found it impossible to find a spot that was not burning hot. She was crying miserably and in obv ious pain. I could not believe what I was seeing. This was supposed to be a public school and these were the school children. And this was their treatment? I wondered what was going on.
Now off to my right was a class outside in session gathered around tether ball poles. There were maybe 15-20 of these students between 6 and 7 years old. There was a teacher with them. Apparently he was the teacher, and he was punishing the separated 8 children by putting them on the hot asphalt in the hot sun. The children the teacher was working with were in half sunlight and half shade. They were all standing upright.
I got my drink of cool water, walked left towards the 8 children in the sun. I looked off to the right toward the Bruite and the main buildings. Standing beneath the shade of the halls were four teachers starring out at the 8 children suffering in the hot sun. I thought that was strange, that they were "teachers" watching or allowing children to suffer these conditions.
hat
I bent over placing my hand flat onto the surface of the sizzling hot asphalt. Instantly my skin burnt and I recoiled in pain. I could have incurred 2nd or 1st degree burns from the asphalt, had I let my hand sizzle longer. The sun, hot on my head can cause brain damage from excessive temperature or heat radiation. That much heat can dehydrate a body within minutes, especially a small sized body that weights only 40 or 50 pounds. Dehydration also can cause irritability and various forms of aggression. Therefore the punishment these teachers were giving the school children was making their behavior worse, not better.
I just had a drink of water. I was fine. I could walk out of the hot sun, without recourse. I did not have to place my bare skin or my fragile non-heat resistant clothing on the hot tar.
I tested the surface of the hot tar again, I asked the little black girl if it was too hot, she looked up her eyes pleading mercy and said, "yes, mamam, it is..." then the bell rang. I waited for my school child. I went to his teacher and asked her professional opinion. She said she agreed with me and sent me to seek the school principal and make a more formal assertion. I did this. The principal said she would take care of it. I do not know if she ever did.
My school age child told me they had done this to him and others as well.
Personally, I believe that the P.E. teacher who put all these children on the hot tarmac needs to be sanctioned for his methods of punishment due to a lack of consideration for the health and well being of the childre. In addition to sitting the 8 children on the hot tarmac, after it was over he did not even allow them to get a drink of water, and instead he continued to compound his already cruel and abusive punishment by reprimanding the children for wiggling, getting up to run around and escape the hot asphalt, and hitting on each other. I consider the P.E teachers methods to be cruel and unusual punishment based on the fact of my observation of making them sit on the sizzling hot tarmac in the heat of the sun for over 25 minutes. This is excessive for a 6 or 7 year old child.
Perhaps the school was thinking of making the punishment so bad that it forces the children to want to do good to avoid the pains of the punishment again. However when a teacher mades a judgement and the well being or health of the child is placed in serious jeopardy, then that teacher himself needs severe discipline sanctions and a reprimand....parents are taught to trust the system...but when the system fails, we need to speak up and see changes made that give providence to our children so that they are encouraged to learn.
This was in the year 2000...in the State of Nevada...where the sun is very hot.
In the year 2000....I arrived on schedule to pick up my young child from the school, however I usually allowed extra minutes before the final bell. So it was 3:05 in the hot afternoon. I walked over to the drinking fountain. I noticed off to my left a strange and unusual sight before my eyes: 8 small children, both boys and girls, 2 white females, 1 black female, 1 asian male, 2 hispanic males, 2 while males; all around the first or second grade level...all sitting or some standing out in the full hot sun on the hot tar asphalt playground at the tether and basketball area, I repeat, in the full hot afternoon sun.
They were squirming around like slow cooked worms in a fry pan. There was no teacher supervising them. I could see they were painfully and extremely uncomfortable on the hot asphalt and in that full hot sun. One little white boy kept smacking the little black girl hard on the head. One little hispanic boy kept laughing and forcring her to keep in the way of the little white boy that was hitting her. One little white girl, dressed in a thin fabric blouse and pants, found it impossible to find a spot that was not burning hot. She was crying miserably and in obv ious pain. I could not believe what I was seeing. This was supposed to be a public school and these were the school children. And this was their treatment? I wondered what was going on.
Now off to my right was a class outside in session gathered around tether ball poles. There were maybe 15-20 of these students between 6 and 7 years old. There was a teacher with them. Apparently he was the teacher, and he was punishing the separated 8 children by putting them on the hot asphalt in the hot sun. The children the teacher was working with were in half sunlight and half shade. They were all standing upright.
I got my drink of cool water, walked left towards the 8 children in the sun. I looked off to the right toward the Bruite and the main buildings. Standing beneath the shade of the halls were four teachers starring out at the 8 children suffering in the hot sun. I thought that was strange, that they were "teachers" watching or allowing children to suffer these conditions.
hat
I bent over placing my hand flat onto the surface of the sizzling hot asphalt. Instantly my skin burnt and I recoiled in pain. I could have incurred 2nd or 1st degree burns from the asphalt, had I let my hand sizzle longer. The sun, hot on my head can cause brain damage from excessive temperature or heat radiation. That much heat can dehydrate a body within minutes, especially a small sized body that weights only 40 or 50 pounds. Dehydration also can cause irritability and various forms of aggression. Therefore the punishment these teachers were giving the school children was making their behavior worse, not better.
I just had a drink of water. I was fine. I could walk out of the hot sun, without recourse. I did not have to place my bare skin or my fragile non-heat resistant clothing on the hot tar.
I tested the surface of the hot tar again, I asked the little black girl if it was too hot, she looked up her eyes pleading mercy and said, "yes, mamam, it is..." then the bell rang. I waited for my school child. I went to his teacher and asked her professional opinion. She said she agreed with me and sent me to seek the school principal and make a more formal assertion. I did this. The principal said she would take care of it. I do not know if she ever did.
My school age child told me they had done this to him and others as well.
Personally, I believe that the P.E. teacher who put all these children on the hot tarmac needs to be sanctioned for his methods of punishment due to a lack of consideration for the health and well being of the childre. In addition to sitting the 8 children on the hot tarmac, after it was over he did not even allow them to get a drink of water, and instead he continued to compound his already cruel and abusive punishment by reprimanding the children for wiggling, getting up to run around and escape the hot asphalt, and hitting on each other. I consider the P.E teachers methods to be cruel and unusual punishment based on the fact of my observation of making them sit on the sizzling hot tarmac in the heat of the sun for over 25 minutes. This is excessive for a 6 or 7 year old child.
Perhaps the school was thinking of making the punishment so bad that it forces the children to want to do good to avoid the pains of the punishment again. However when a teacher mades a judgement and the well being or health of the child is placed in serious jeopardy, then that teacher himself needs severe discipline sanctions and a reprimand....parents are taught to trust the system...but when the system fails, we need to speak up and see changes made that give providence to our children so that they are encouraged to learn.
This was in the year 2000...in the State of Nevada...where the sun is very hot.
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