Dedicated to my friend JP the Great El Campeador of Election 2008
A Story for JP
Hi JP, here it is as I once promised. This Post has been with me for a long time and I have had more Headlines in mind than would fill ten pages. In the end I decided to call it “My story for JP” to make it easy to find while I was developing it. The Headline as it appears above I selected moments ago because it fits in with what I have to say. The idea started of with:
My 76th Birthday Notes
In South Africa it is 8/2/2016 11:04:17 PM on my Computer clock right now as I have just drawn it from the keyboard. I don’t know how to tell you why I am doing it but there is a reason. I don’t do things without a reason, except when I sit down or lie down, which I do very often, to do absolutely nothing but to think.
I go to bed at sunset; doing that for years now, and wake up anytime during the night and work on the keyboard. Eventually I go back to bed and get up again at sunrise. Living on my own by choice I can do these things.
In a way, having woken up before 11 tonight, there is a subconscious reason; yes tonight it may be there because I am now as I tap the keyboard less than one hour from age 76. Perhaps I shall take this up in a Post in my main WordPress Blog one day. Oh yes, I shall do that; a thought has been going through my mind on and off lately to do a Post on “Days of my Life” or something like that, to highlight other events that occurred over a full year of my life and influenced, or guided or cautioned me about my journey of life and where I am going.
For now, having only forty minutes left of age 75 I will close this down and find a place to publish it. If it is someone else’s birthday too tomorrow, Heppie Heppie we say in South Africa. If someone else is also 76 at twelve, do send me a note.
For posterity the recorded date of birth of the Bama is given as August 4th 1961. Wherever he was born we got to accept that the Bama was born, and the date is as good as any; he will be 55 years old on this day August 4th of 2016.
He is not done with America; don’t let him fool you. Watch his last move the day before the next President moves into the White House to make it white again.
JP ole Friend, the foregoing stopped there, but I continued to collect and compile stuff that is needed to synchronize my thoughts with reality; there is so little real in the World today and I have a need to find it, even if it is just for me but all sorts of things interfered and my notes started to look like a dog’s breakfast [my sincere apologies to the noble race of the dog; it is not my intention to insult the dog World] but the old cliché exists and nobody would understand it if I describe what I saw as “an utter mess as only the human race can make of his life.”
I believe you are a wise man. We have had very few differences but the two of us know that we can learn from differences and we have done so.
I came to realize as we would all react to being thrown into a large pool filled with icy water and chunks of frozen ice on a bitterly cold winter morning, when it struck me that at the rate we are going right now we will never reconcile all the differences between all the aspirations, hates and prejudice of cultures, languages and the only way out is to withdraw into self and sort the latter out first.
I went on to collect just a few things about our country. The links are here but you don’t have to read them all now; do it at your leisure when you have the time. Just remember however, that these are a few illustrations of reality where we are today
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/cry.htm
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/09/university-cape-town-removes-statue-cecil-rhodes-celebration-afrikaner-protest
https://ikejakson.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/judge-ruth-bader-ginsburg-and-the-south-african-constitution-of-her-dreams-2/
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/61197/Man-shot-dead-in-South-Africa
http://southafricatoday.net/media/hard-news/the-white-ghettos-of-south-africa/
On the last I made a note: “To my friend JP in America number one. Would you like this? Note that is what the Bama has for his ultimate goal for you all. But I didn’t send it out or published it.
At that point in time a while after my birthday, I continues to read but could not find a connection point until one night I found this on Google:
“The Berlin Wall. During the early years of the Cold War, West Berlin was a geographical loophole through which thousands of East Germans fled to the democratic West. In response, the Communist East German authorities built a wall that totally encircled West Berlin. It was thrown up overnight, on 13 August 1961.”
This piece comes to you in here verbatim [by copy and paste] and you can check it out but I didn’t even bother to copy the link.
There is a reason for not bothering about the link because that was what chucked me into the freezing water.
I sat up and heard myself saying to myself with my own mouth: “Hey, but this is nonsense; that is not what I have previously been leaded to believe about that wall.”
Since then I have made a thorough and detailed study of that Wall from that night [as quoted above] and right through to the end [including President’s Reagan speech at the Wall until its demolition.
I am still off Google Gmail and doubt whether I will ever care to return. It’s really a lot of crap; the only decent email system [I don’t care if it is contradicted by anyone] is in Windows as in Gates, name Bill, but I considered all the young fools of today reading that Google excerpt and believing how that Wall went up “overnight.”
But I am here and hope to be around for another little while. Let me get back to the main purpose my intended Post; please also take that be my swansong in case I should depart from this here old World and you can’t find any trace of where I gone.
Back to the icy water in my face that I mention two or three paragraphs above the South African links.
It struck me like a bolt of hot lightning; we are all living behind walls.
I then had it and put it into an “innards pocket” of my mind; it has been with me for some time to complete the keyboard work up to this point, I have to do all my Internet work this way because of my eye impediment. The keyboard is set up to key every small bit or a long article in MSWord in a large font that I can still see; when it s done I send it through the spell checker where after I reduce the font size to Verdana 20 and then I copy/paste to the Post.
Back to the Illusions, the Tall Tales and the Walls.
JP, ole Friend, you know, I carried this around for months and tell you some Tall Tales of Great Men, of grand history, of Money and Men of Money, of Ambition and Memories; many of these Tall Tales could be like that of President Reagan [the Grand Old Man of recent America] that stood at the Brandenburg Gate of the Berlin Wall and challenged Russia with the call “Mister Secretary, take down this Wall” but it would serve no purpose.
Walls are part of our lives, sometimes just in our homes; then there is the fence with the neighbor. As manufacturing developed walls and later high security walls went up around factories; as crime increased walls went up around entire industrial complexes; when the rich started building their multi million homes it was erected to include a wall right around the entire property; in South Africa of recent times security fences and walls with spikes and/or barbed wire rolls were erected around the entire village or the neighborhood as each one would decide.
I now live in a small hamlet; having to let go of my own scrub fed chickens [for years had my own eggs] and the dog when I moved to my present place; found a neighbor I liked and we started talking about getting dogs and scrub chickens. You have to talk to your neighbor when you want to do that because you cannot tie your dog down, or tell a scrub chicken not to cross the line into the vegetable patch that you and the neighbor had as we both did; my neighbor became a good friend. We planted in tandem, shared our crops and did the same as we put in fruit trees and handed each other some that the other did not have on his place.
My neighbor friend died of cancer at the age of 45 three years ago [a sad affair, tragic and sad] and a farmer bought the property on an auction for additional accommodation for a worker that is also needed in town [many of the wealthy farmers do that] and though the new occupant is a nice person they are hardly ever there. That’s at the back of my property; on my right I have a cop as a neighbor and friend and they have a little Jack Russell dog that befriended me; he barked one night about a year ago [so I have some protection] and the day after when I walked around my abode my tall fruit ladder was gone. Let me cut this short; the police came and the ladder “walked back all by himself and parked in the same spot behind my dwelling virtually right outside my bedroom window, where I have now chained and padlocked him and the police have circulated the town about the “Old Oom” is happy for the return of his prodigal ladder. That’s how things are done in rural South Africa because that is all the Police are allowed to do in our land where we have the most modern and most beautiful Constitution and Bill of Rights for We the People; don’t take my word for that; just ask your American Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; she called it that.
A few nights ago a bundle of fire barbeque wood walked of my place from just in front of my front door in my barbeque area.
Three years ago the drought hit us followed by three very bad winters with black frost and severe damage to my fruit trees, but I managed to keep two orange trees and one fig alive, and our entire olive tree hedge that can survive anything. My now deceased neighbor and I had planned it together so we had half of the olive trees on his side and half on my side with a sprinkler system fed by my pump on his borehole on his electricity. We harvest buckets full of black olives and I can a lot myself.
Anyway, between drought and black frost by the start of winter this year I only had one orange tree in fruit this year; by early June 2016 it had exactly 12 beautiful oranges nice yellow but not ripe yet.
One morning a short while later a friend knocked on my door one morning and asked whether I had picked my oranges because he had always noticed them as he walked by and he noticed that morning that there were none. I walked to the tree with him and he was right.
Now JP, a navel orange blooms in late September and is covered in blooms during the whole of October; the blooms are down and the tiny little dark green fruits are there by early November; they grow from light yellow in April and May to bright yellow round and a sight to behold by end May but that fruit is ripe for picking and eating by about the 29th of June spot on every year, sweet delicious, healthy and wholesome from a tree for which an old man had made the hole in the ground, planted the tree and nursed it through more than five seasons of summers and winters and he was hurt that Monday morning.
Late afternoon Sunday the previous day a group of small beggar children aged between say, 8 and 9 years old had knocked at my door asking whether they could have some oranges and I had told them that I always in good years share my fruit with the hostel children but that the fruit was not ripe yet this time when one interrupted me with “but they are ripe,..” but the annoyance was turning into bile in my throat when he dared to inform me that that had been to the tree and the fruit is ripe, and “they would like some “ because they were hungry.
JP, I had kept my temper under control that Sunday but told them with a voice that I controlled as well as I could that they can come back at the end of the month and I would give them some, Then I shoved them off and closed the door.
That Monday morning I took my pick axe handle from my storage and called the police. They arrived on the dot; our police are well trained, good decent civil folks trying daily and putting their own lives at risk every day but “their hands are tied behind their backs” by a Law of Freedom and the Right of these Vagrant Children to Life and Happiness, and seemingly to come and take my oranges during the night.
Anyway, I have now been carried away by my frustrations of the moment, that Monday I told the policeman that they had better put the word out that if that happens again they would have to bring the man from the morgue in to fetch the corpses of three vagrant children with their heads and brains smashed into pulp by a prodigal pick axe handle, and I showed them that item.
JP, forgive the outburst but I must finish this [will consider revising or deleting it before publishing] but I must explain it before I can deal with the Walls around us.
Every one or most in any event of these youthful innocent “chillun o de Lor” of course has a mother. That is determined as such by the Laws of Nature. The mother is invariably the child of a drunken father, who has been unemployed for most of his life, and she delivers her first child when she is barely 15; by 16 or 17 she has the second one. They are all hungry all the time because most of them don’t know the father and in many cases the mother cannot tell you who the father was. Let me stop the tirade now.
I realize now that there is a wall between us; it is an invisible wall but it is high and impenetrable steel. We have to erect it to survive.
Ingenious Mankind figured out how to make clocks, watches and other timepieces to tell us the days and dates and days and time accurate to mill fractions of one second. In many older towns the time clocks sit in towers above the City Hall; in many countries there will be huge monuments of Time to their Nations, as Big Ben over the River Thames in London OK is a good example.
These are however, just mechanical showpieces of the Greatness of Mankind and often merely a showcase of our achievements.
Real time has a Master Clock that is called the Time Clock of the Earth and those that occupy its surface. Some [and I place myself in that category] call it the clock or the timepiece of Nature; many others [in which I once again place myself] will call it Clock of Creation. It has a pendulum that ticks along and measure the only Time that really matters. It is not in the least relevant to me how old the Globe is or how it came to be or whether or how it will continue. This Clock tells me that Time is infinite. Mankind cannot measure how old the Globe is; modern man can hardly record anything with meaning more than 500 years ago. All we know about that is that the World was different World to the one we know today. Some nations, like Egypt and Israel have located some old artifacts from which they can trace their origins back to 2000 ago, but that is all.
What does it matter anyway? All that we seem to be able to agree on is that the past is finite, simply because there has to be a beginning.
While we argue on is that the Great Pendulum swings back and forth into all eternity, as far as we can guess what eternity is. It is all conjecture; the answer is simply that we don’t know and don’t need to know that. It is merely an illusion that we have to know more.
In the meantime I want a Huge Wall between me and the rest of what is called Democracy in South Africa. In fact, I am beginning to think that the word Democracy is an illusion in the first place. Freedom? What is Freedom when somebody can walk into my small piece of dirt and pick my oranges? How do you define that Freedom and his Right to live if I get a dog [at this stage I want to get two Rottweiler dogs and two pit bulls and train them to rip to shreds and kill any vagrant entering one inch of my property] but I am not allowed to let one dog touch the little piece of shit when he sneaks in to steal my oranges.
I am suppose to take his little hand and escort him to my gate, give him my oranges and some meat and cake and kiss his little ass. If he so much as scratches his little hand at the fence the police must come and shoot my dogs and lock me up for assault.
Is this what Freedom has brought us? Is this Democracy?
No JP, I am getting out of it and build my walls. No man is an Island, they say, to which I say “then you will find a heck of a lot of small Islands in my area as we say: and Up You to Freedom and Democracy.”
To be continued in Part 2.
Ike Jakson
In Americus GA saka Americoon
ikejakson@gmail.com
Jaksonian Philosophy 