Pinto Bean Politics!

When I was growing up in a country store on Beaver Creek in Knott County Kentucky, we sold pinto beans by the pound, weighed from a galvanized barrel that sat under the main counter in the store. We bought the beans in 100 pound bags, dumped them in the barrel which also held a pretty nice blackjack carved from a piece of wood to a shape just like a miniature baseball bat, about a foot long with a nice handgrip and about a 3-4 inch circumference on the head which was drilled to about three inches down the handle to include a nice round cylinder of lead. To my knowledge the blackjack was never used in the long period my parents operated the store. Our customers came in, usually talked small talk for a short while, bought whatever they needed, maybe even a pound or two of pinto beans, and left without ever needing to be knocked out with the blackjack in the bean barrel. I no longer own that blackjack but in today's world of the most corrupt politics in the history of the nation, and the worst living example of a human being working on a daily basis from the White House to destroy the entire nation and our democracy, we sure need a good metaphorical political blackjack. On a recent check of the price of pinto beans, I found that WalMart is charging $14.94 for a 20 pound bag of pinto beans. That boils down to about 74.7cents a pound for bulk pinto beans. WalMart is now selling the one pound bag of pinto beans for a dollar. When I was often helping my parents behind the bean barrel, I don't think we ever charged more than 10cents a pound and we were making a decent profit in those days. The point to this focus on pinto beans is important because there are millions of Americans of all stripes and cultures who are eating pinto beans on a daily basis. Several different cultures are highly dependent on pinto beans as a staple source of protein. Most people of moderate to poor means in the American south depend on pinto beans as a major portion of their diet. That includes both Caucasian and African American citizens of the deep south. Most members of the various Hispanic cultures in America are also largely dependent on pinto beans. Frijoles, in many forms, are a common sight on Hispanic dinner tables. Nearly every person who ever grew up in Central and Southern Appalachia grew up, in large part, on pinto beans. We even had pinto beans once a week in the high school lunch room at Knott County High School at Pippa Passes, Kentucky, when I was a student there. Pinto beans may well be the answer to help us solve our ongoing attempted tyranny by TRAITOR Trump and the Right Wing Radical Repugnican party.

One of my favorite memories about pinto beans goes back to about 1992 when I was working for a short while, between human services jobs, at a horse farm in Central Kentucky. I was salesprepping several brood mares which were headed toward a November Breeding Stock Sale at Keeneland. The mares were actuallly owned by a man who was contracting for the sales prepping with the owner of a farm I was working on at the time. I was sent to the owner's farm to do the work. One day, the owner who was born and raised in Quito Ecuador, a Mexican immigrant blacksmith, and I were standing in front of a barn in a conversation and found ourselves talking about how we had grown up in three very different locations and cultures. We suddenly discovered that all three of us had grown up eating pinto beans, one in Mexico, one in Ecuador, and one in Eastern Kentucky. It was an educational moment for me for sure. What is the point to all this and politics? What the Democratic party needs to do to win all the next upcoming elections in this country is to locate, educate, register, and guarantee the turnout to vote of the great majority of the pinto bean cultures in America. If we do that we will be back in control of our country, our Democracy, and our future. We will no longer be facing the horrible situation in which we finid ourselves today. We can begin the next 25 to 50 years of necessary work in order to save our country after all the political, moral, and ethical damage which has been done over the last ten years by TRAITOR Trump and the other TRAITORS who facilitate most of his crimes against the government, the country, the world, and the planet. The answer is all about pinto beans.