What We Leave Behind Us When We Go

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!