Iffing Way–Part 4: UnPharoah … November 10, 2014

 Jonathots Daily Blog

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What if a voice of sanity had risen up at various stages in the story of human history, to offer a challenging view when craziness was about to win the day?

If …

It all revolved around a game of intimidation.

The only way to protect your particular parcel of land from intrusion and invasion was to convince other kingdoms nearby that you were well-established, well-fortified and darned well intent on fighting to the death to “keep your own.” Thus the purpose for building huge walls, great monuments and fortifications.

Thutmose III was well aware of the situation.

As Pharoah of Egypt, it was his job to maintain the order of his domain and keep his citizens safe from the marauding hordes. Any sign of weakness was an invitation to be destroyed by the stronger villains of the desert.

To build such huge constructions took man power. Now, society was divided into four sections:

• royalty, which would never lift a finger for such tasks
• farmers, who raised the food which kept the citizenry in bread and wine
• soldiers, who protected the sovereignty of the turf
• and slaves, the cheapest labor possible, to perform the most arduous duties

After many years of peaceful coexistence with the Jews, the Egyptians grew tired of this clan of immigrants who seemed to be overtaking the social order of the land. A movement began against them. It was decided that the free meal ticket provided by the previous Pharoah, out of loving deference to Joseph, should be terminated and that these people should be put to hard labor, working for the state.

The pressure was immense.

Matter of fact, sitting in front of Thutmose III was an edict to proclaim all Jews as slaves. All that was needed was his seal. Then the document would become a holy edict, enforced viciously by the taskmasters against these people without a country.

He delayed.

He stalled so long that his critics began to call him a coward, and even a traitor. Thutmose III tried to draw a deep breath of wisdom and sanity. For after all, what seems prudent today has arms, legs, breath and anger in the future generations subjected to the treatment.

What should he do?

After many nights, lying sleepless in his bed, he devised a plan. He decided to alternate his work force–take the relocated Jews and put them in the fields for part of the year and bring the field workers in to build the walls and monuments necessary to maintain a sense of control.

He also concluded that it was unnecessary to build many pyramids–one for each Pharoah who died. Why not one gigantic pyramid for all the rulers who had gone on? It would be just as intimidating and beautiful, but more easily conceived and carried out by the workers.

When Thutmose III presented his plan to the council they immediately rejected it, which made no difference whatsoever, since he was a dictator.

Reluctantly, the plan was carried out and the Jews, rather than being slaves, were turned into brethren with a variety of tasks to contribute to the cause.

After many years and much success with this new plan, the Council of the Jewish people, under the leadership of a man named Moses, came and asked for permission to emigrate to another land, where they would take the experiences of Egypt and their own faith, and build a life.

It was negotiated. It was agreed.

The transition was smooth because it was not the escaping of slaves, but rather, the releasing of friends to their new mission.

Thutmose III died a happy man, interred in the greatest pyramid ever constructed, having saved a whole race of people from slavery and allowing for that same tribe to find their God and their expression.

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Sackcloth and Ashes … February 13, 2013

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Long ago, when fire-breathing dragons stomped across the earth and a gallon of gasoline cost less than milk, prophets would occasionally ramble into town, condemning the deeds of the wicked, speaking forth the chilling but effective sound bite, “Repent or die.” Even more disconcerting was how little the prophet actually cared about whether his message was received in a positive light, and often actually would have preferred it if death was the result of his invitation. I suppose there were those cities which would resist the opportunity to save their lives–we wouldn’t be that familiar with them because they are no longer on the landscape. But often the ruler of the nation would comprehend the seriousness of the situation and repent, ordering all of his subjects to do so, demonstrating their regret by adorning themselves in sackcloth and smearing ashes all over their bodies.

Time marches on. (Or does it creep? I’m not sure.)

We now have advanced in our self-esteem to the extent that we would never consider lowering ourselves to wear sackcloth and display bacteria-ridden ashes on our faces. Yet it doesn’t change the fact that we are still doing many of the same ridiculous practices that should require a bit of reflection, if not repentance brought on by the threat of doom.

I’m not a prophet. (I guess that would make me a non-prophet organization. But I digress.) Yet, to me there are three obvious things that need focus in this country as primal objectives, allowing for a discussion about the implementation of how to achieve them, but not whether they are righteous and necessary.

1. Let’s stop killing. There you go.  I’m not picky. Let’s stop killing babies so much. Let’s stop killing people with capital punishment. And let’s stop starting wars because we have a big military and they get out of practice if they hang around the base too much with no real combat experience. I think it’s a good start. Every time you stop something in life, two things happen: you cease a few things and you start up other things. Stopping killing would probably take away some of our rights in this country. But it would give us a sense that we were trying to address a murderous history of rampage that seems to be threatening to infest our national DNA. Yes–stop killing. Then have the debate about how to actually make it a practical or legal application.

2. Stop stealing. Let’s not ask people to do jobs that we don’t want to do and then continue to insist that they live in squalor and poverty in order to serve us. Let’s stop taking away from people their praise-worthy actions and pretending they’re lesser fellows. Let’s greatly discourage corporations from becoming so greedy to feather their nest that they kill off all competing birds. Let’s stop stealing. That would be good, right? We could decide that refusing to steal is a good thing and then have a healthy debate on ways to initiate integrity.

3. Why don’t we stop destroying? If there is any chance at all that we are party to affecting the climate on this earth, why don’t we just grin and bear it? Why don’t we find out what we can do and instead of arguing about whether it is pleasant or within our wheelhouse of understanding, and just stop the destruction. Why don’t we become the nation that makes it “uncool” to be unfeeling? Why don’t we stop destroying our own psyche by peppering our young people with violence and encouraging them to use technology incessantly–which is gradually fostering an epidemic of indifference?

Why don’t we stop destroying our bodies? Why can’t we encourage farmers to raise more vegetables so you can get a tomato at the grocery store for less money than a greasy eight-hundred-calorie hamburger at McDonald’s?

Certainly it would demand that we abandon hypocrisy. It would require that we forfeit some of our abstract definitions of freedom to provide for the common good. The same people who extol the beauty of marriage–which is the setting aside of sexual freedom, the possibility of many partners to cling to one–feel grieved over the notion of making it more difficult to get a gun for themselves in order to possibly save the lives of those on the perimeter of their understanding.

I don’t think we’ll ever get our nation to sport sackcloth and ashes. But I do think we could sit down and agree that killing, stealing and destroying are really bad things, and even though we may have varying definitions, in the long run, we could come up with a FEW ideas limiting death, thievery and destruction.

Ash Wednesday–a religious holiday when people commiserate for an hour or so about whether they treat those friends around them with enough respect and if they should eat less chocolate.

Maybe it’s time for some real repentance. In the absence of a prophet who isn’t afraid of the king, queen and parliament, let me proclaim, stop killing, stop stealing, stop destroying.

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The Back Room … September 22, 2012

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It was small.

Even in my childhood memories, the space was cramped and overpopulated with furnishings and just stuff. It was a back area in my mom and dad‘s loan company which had been partitioned off with accordion doors allowing for privacy, because they had those smoky windows in them that looked like broken glass or glued-together pieces of rock candy.

There was a refrigerator, although my memory serves that not much food ever stocked the shelves, a desk, where my dad would sit and do income tax returns for local farmers to make extra money during that particular season.

That desk was also the location of one of my first adventures into mischievous boyhood–peering into the future of manhood–because my dad kept a stack of detective magazines in there, which I would slip away and read occasionally, giving me my first glimpse into the carnal interactions between men and women. I can still feel the tingles.

My dad also tried to hide his cashews in that drawer next to the magazines, and I also partook of those delicacies, I’m sure much to his disapproval. In the far-left hand corner of this back room was a water closet. It’s amazing–after all these years I can still remember that little toilet, which grew smaller and smaller as I grew bigger and bigger–and a tiny sink, which offered only cold water to the passing traveler.

There was a large green cabinet in this tiny room, taking up a tremendous amount of space. In it was the residue of many of my dad’s dreams which never actually survived sleepiness. One of the things inside that green cabinet was a miniature printing press my dad bought, hoping he could make a little extra money by providing business cards and wedding invitations to the area consumers. He even printed some business cards for my high school music group. It took six weeks to accomplish, and to my memory, was the only thing that printing press ever achieved before being placed into the green cabinet of oblivion.

There was also a couch right underneath an air conditioner, which never worked. I mean the air conditioner. The couch was quite functional, and became one of my favorite spots in my teen years, especially when there was a chore to do at home, like mowing the lawn. My parents would find me asleep on that couch and abruptly awaken me with a rebuke about my laziness. It’s probably why still, to this day, I find it difficult to sleep in front of other people.

Completing the furnishing of this miniscule arena was an old piano. I know that sounds ridiculous. Why would you have an old piano in the back of a loan company? Well, because it was a loan company, my mom and dad would obviously provide finance to people in our community, who often promised to pay back the sum and ended up falling short of that lofty goal. One delinquent client offered the piano to my mom and dad in replacement for the payoff on his loan. They reluctantly agreed and stuck it in the back of the loan company with aspirations of selling it and retrieving some of their revenue, but never finding the time to write an advertisement.

So I played that piano. Sometimes I got yelled at because I was playing it when customers arrived, and my father seemed to think it was ill-advised to have a financial institution doubling as a lounge. But it was on that piano that I wrote my first two songs, when I was eighteen years of age. I don’t know why I didn’t think of composing before that particular juncture in my life, but on that day I wrote one song, and without stopping, turned around and wrote another one. Within a year’s time, both of those tunes ended up on a 45-RPM record, which I believe sold twelve copies (I assume, one to each of the disciples).

Back to that couch…it was also where my second son was birthed. It wasn’t planned that way. We were not gypsies or raised in barns. It’s just that Dollie, my wife, was in labor and wasn’t quite certain of her symptoms, so she waddled on down to the loan company to see my mother, and before help could arrive, our son did. Oh, it was big doings in the town. There was such a crowd out in front of the loan company to see the new baby that I barely had space to get through the door to visit my new kid. I hadn’t seen that many people lined up in Sunbury, Ohio, since Farmer Johnson quietly advertised that he had some hard cider available.

That back room holds so many memories for me. Matter of fact, during one financially lean time, Dollie and I slipped in there with our little boy, Jon Russell, to sleep on the hard floor at night because we had no other place to go. My father had passed on my then. My mother certainly would not have approved, so I acquired a key from her, made a copy, and we snuck in at eleven at night and were gone by seven in the morning. We just spread a blanket on the wood floor, lay down and were grateful for shelter.

About twenty years ago I went back to my little community to take a look at that back room. I know it’s corny–but I had to see it.  It was gone. The building that once held my mom and dad’s loan company had been transformed into a hardware store, removing walls to create space. So I ambled my way back through the dry goods and ended up in the area, as far as I could tell, that had been the back room. It was now filled with shelving, nails, screws, hammers and saw blades.

But I took that private moment to reflect on the back room and how much it provided for me. It gave me my first festering of manhood. I deeply enjoyed my snatched cashews. There was the occasional uninterrupted nap on the couch, which later ended up being the birthing bed for my son, Joshua. There was the green cabinet with the quiet printing press, and the loud piano, which proclaimed boldly that I had the ability to do something other than be a small-town flunky. There was even the floor, which provided me a place of rest.

While people insist that too much in the realm of commerce, religion and politics is done in the “back room,” my version patiently nursed me through an evolution of foolish youth, preparing me to walk out ready to meet people in the real world.

The back room. Like Joshua, it was kind of my birthing chamber. It was there that for the first time in my life, I took what was available to me and tried my darndest to use it the best I could.

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Peanut Better … July 19, 2012

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I like peanut butter.

I do. If you’ll forgive me a bit of presumption, I think it’s safe to say that most folks enjoy the stuff. There are those who have allergies to it, and always some who will insist that it’s “just too something or other,” but peanut butter certainly has not survived merely because of its partnership with jelly. Especially since I’ve been cutting back on eating too much meat, peanut butter is a great source of protein. Unfortunately, like meat, it is an overwhelming storehouse of calories.

Español: Mantequilla de maní (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I do not understand why we live in a nation that can work on several I-phones at the same time and have numerous reality shows funded, leading to no seemingly sensible conclusion while raising funds for all sorts of causes, many of which are nearly impossible to explain, yet we can’t come up with a way to make peanut butter that’s low-calorie.We have also failed at the search for really good-for-you pasta. Sugars, carbohydrates and fat seem to escape the purview and perfection of our scientists. We have come up with products that are fat-free, but normally that just means they add more sugar. We have come up with products that are sugar-free, but their textures, taste and timeliness are debatable.

Is it too much to ask to have someone seek out a government grant to make peanut butter plausible to our diet? Maybe it’s because we talk about healthiness in this society as we come up with a double-decker sausage McMuffin (since the first one certainly was not large and greasy enough). Is it really necessary to have three hamburger patties with bacon and cheese?

It comes down to the issue of healthy, wealthy and wise. That is the order that we have placed these three pursuits in while advertising our vision for a successful existence. But I don’t think it would hurt for us to begin with wisdom. If the most nutritious and healthy foods are also often those products that are least in calories, why can’t we take a hint from Mother Nature and learn how she makes delicious treats without stuffing them to the rim with calories? Isn’t there a scientist somewhere who might actually want to help humanity instead of padding the bottom line of drug companies? I guess if we worked on food that was healthy and low in calories, using wisdom in doing that, there are other companies that might suffer temporarily–until they made the transition over to better choices.

For instance, we were making plows in this country until World War II started, and then those who were making farm implements just changed over to constructing bombs and airplanes. I realize we have become dependent on oil, but there’s no reason to believe that within a decade the oil companies couldn’t turn their profit margins over to better, more practical choices. If you start talking about a healthy diet, the farmers and ranchers get very nervous because they wonder if they will be able to get rid of all their crops and cattle.

So if you decide not to lead with wisdom, it’s going to be very difficult to be healthy. And if you’re not healthy, you’re probably not going to have the initiative or the lifespan to achieve wealthy. So I would suggest that we change the old saying from “healthy, wealthy and wise” to “wise, healthy and wealthy.”

And let the first piece of wisdom be an attempt to put nutritious food in our mouths that is low in calories so that we can eat a lot of it and feel very satisfied without putting on excess pounds and loading ourselves down with obesity and health problems.

Why don’t we start with peanut butter? Yes. Let’s make it peanut better. Let’s find out if we can make a product that is absolutely filled with good taste but is lower and lower in calories. Why don’t we make pasta that is not packed with carbohydrates, which shoot up our weight and our blood sugar?

It is a worthy project for some aspiring young researcher, who would like to really help this society instead of debating health care for our populace, which is suffering under the load of food that is inevitably destined to make them too plump.

Peanut better. Yes–I will believe that our country is going forward when the citizens are the primary concern of both the government and the corporations, instead of maintaining a traditional approach to sales and commerce, leaving us unhealthy, pretty stupid and without enough time to get wealthy.

Let me know when peanut butter has much less to butter me up and is better for me. Until then, I will continue to eat it–cautiously–convincing myself that it’s better than Sloppy Joe.

   

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