Excerpts from: NO WAY JOSE

[Saturdayist]

NO WAY JOSE
or
(Move over Ronald McDonald!)

By Peter Bové


...If you have yet to hear of Jose Bové, he is best known as the French farmer who made international headlines in 1998 for “vandalizing” a McDonald’s as a political protest against the McDonaldization of the world, staged in the tiny town of Millau, Montpelier.

...The popular French singer Francis Cabrel has described Jose Bové as, "One of the last courageous, natural, honest voices left in a world where the rest are tarnished by compromise.” In the spirit of this statement I give you two small gifts of American culture from two great American icons: Mark Twain and John Wayne. The first: “It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare”. And the other: “Courage is being scared to death – but saddling up anyway.” After all, have we become so full of ourselves (fearful) that we really believe we can improve on millennia of evolution? Maybe not, but some of us have become greedy enough to attempt to trick everyone into thinking we can and should.
God made it right the first time. It is our responsibility to learn how to use it properly. When I was in my mid-teens my good friend contracted a terrible case of poison ivy. His mom brought him to a doctor who gave him penicillin and asked him to use calamine lotion. It just got worse. By the third day he was in total agony. I looked up a cure in one of my trusty books based on Japanese folk medicine and Macrobiotics and found one. Chlorophyll plaster. 90% green leaves, 10% mint leaves and 10% unbleached white flour to cause it to paste. I went out to a field and gathered up all the broad leaf greens I could find, borrowed some mint from my Grandfather’s garden and grabbed some unbleached flour from my Grandmother’s cupboard. We spread the plaster over the affected area, which in this case was his entire body, and sent him off to bed. Aside from a ruined set of sheets he awoke with 90% of the poison ivy gone. It seemed a miracle to us. We were so excited we went to tell the doctor who refused to see us. “Get those hippie quacks out of my waiting room”. We heard him squelch. I guess we scared him. We ignored him and went happily off, because we knew, as Eleanor Roosevelt had said, “No one can make you feel inferior without mutual consent.” I will keep you in my prayers Mon Uncle Jose.