Jesse vs Barrack. What a coincidnece.

An attack on my vegetable garden by huge Florida locusts reminded me of a poem by an anonymous poet many years ago. "Remonstrance with the snails", a very funny poem about the frustration of a gardner at snails which made nightly visits to his rows of peas.

A large number of big Florida locusts had descended on my vegetable garden over the fourth of July week end. Maybe they were celebrating the fourth too and decided to feast on my vegetables. They had one night to pack up and leave or face the music. These creatures were big and their teeth showed from a distance. They were chopping away at the juicy leaves leaving huge holes and stubs.

Spraying them with chemicals was not an option. In the good old days in the village, fresh ash from the fireplace deterred pests from attacking vegetables. I had no ash to sprinkle on the leaves. Hitting them would mean killing the plants too and the locusts looked like they would fight back. They would stop feeding and watch carefully when aproached, as if trying to figure why they were being disturbed. No sign of fear at all.
The next t morning, they were still busy and their destructive work was quite evident. Still no clue how to get rid of them without using insecticide sprays.

All day at work, the thought would pop up in my mind, what to do with the locusts -- actually what to do to them if they didn't leave and move on to the fresh shrub all over the place for them now that the rains were regular and everything is flourishing.

On opening my mailbox for a quick glance at break, there was CNN news and up popped Jesse Jackson Sr, looking grim after the bad remarks about brother Barrack Obama. Brother Jesse looked like he could fit both feet in his mouth. Was he guilty as charged, of saying all those nasty things about Obama? He probably said much more than the microphone picked up.
I remembered pictures from the civil rights era. The Alabama sheriff's deputies using powerful water hoses on African Americans like Jesse and others of the civil right era, who were fighting the injustice against Africans in the United States in those days, not that injustice had totally ceased today.
Jesse must be feeling less important and neglected, just like the baby suddenly shoved to the side when a new born baby fresh from the hospital joins the family.
For the past several months, everywhere you look, it is Barrack this, Barrack that. Nobody is talking about Jesse Jackson. Even when he ran for president, nobody really took him seriously. He was just making a statement, that African Americans, a black man could actually run for the office of the president of the United States of America. Here we have Barrack, known as Barry in his younger days, actually just a few months away from living in the white house. Quite a good possibility.
Jesse acted like the typical former baby who would pinch or bite the new baby when nobody seemed to be looking. The former baby would try so hard to be happy with the new arrival, but when everything which used to be his go to the new arrival, problems arise and it takes experienced parents to settle things for everybody to live happily ever after. Sometimes, happily ever after never happens and bad blood remain between siblings for a lifetime. We shall see how this Jesse and Barrack thing fans out in the end.

My mind went back to the water hose attacks on civil rights marchers of the nineteen sixties and all of a sudden, I got it. Yes, yes, yes, powerful jets of water. That's it. I wondered why it took so long to think of that. No chemicals, no mess, and quite humane too. The locusts will not even know what hit them. The plants have survived Florida's torrential rainfalls, so what's new with powerful jets of water.

That evening, after work, I got my arsenal together quickly as soon as I got home, before it got dark. The feast was still going on. A test blast showed promise.

The locusts were taken by surprise. They never came back.