Scum or scam?

Image by Aoi /. Upsplash

Country Notebook

By Rogene "Jeannie" McPherson

Journal columnist

President Trump and I have at least one thing in common. We both have a pond/pool that has debilitating algae in a body of water important to us. His is referring to a reflective pool; mine is a regular old farm pond I enjoyed seeing my grandchildren play in. Noticed I used the past tense for enjoy as the amount of algae is now prohibiting swimming.

President Trump’s reflecting pool cost more than $16 million in recent renovations, including a specialized blue paint job that is now peeling off.  Mine when build cost under $3,000, but has no concrete floor. It was excavated about 15 feet with an uneven native rock foundation.

In a recent news account, Trump suggested pranksters poured fertilizer into the pool thus causing overwhelming algae growth. I don’t know about pranksters doing the deed, but I do know that the cause of my excessive algae is fertilizer in the run-off water of the cornfield that drains right into the ditch leading into the pond.

As taxpayers, we are paying for the wages of those trying to strain out the algae in the reflective pool. I have yet to find federal funding or a grant for algae removal in farm ponds. Mother Nature helped a little when the heavy rainfall caused some algae to flow like a green blanket over the pond’s spillway.

Technically, algae is a form of undesirable pond scum that we see mostly on the surface of the water. We often use the word scum to refer to something we don’t want or find obnoxious, such as the build-up of yuck in the shower or someone we don’t like.

Using the word scum in association with a person, likely it is used to identify an individual  who is immoral, untrustworthy, corrupt or unworthy of our attention. Whenever I get a message on my phone suggesting the call is potential scam or if it is a number I don’t recognize, I press the cancel button. I often receive six to 10 of these each weekday. Everyone does, at least those of us who are older.

Appropriate or not, I am suggesting scammers are like scum, especially when I see television stories about individuals being scammed out of thousands of dollars, often directed to the older residents living off their retirement accounts.   

One of the Kansas City television stations recently interviewed a woman about a letter she received from an agency with a check for more than $8,000. This was the amount she would need to pay the taxes on the $750,000 prize money she would soon receive. According to instructions that came with the check, she was to cash the check before telling anyone about her winnings. That obviously was a sign the caller didn’t want a family member to talk her out of cashing the check. And, doesn’t it seem a little odd that anyone could estimate your personal taxes?

The woman obviously was elderly with health issues. She realized, before cashing the check, she should show it to her daughter and the scam was avoided. By cashing the check, the scammer would have had access to her banking information thus making it possible to withdraw additional money from her account and possibly leaving nothing for her to live on.

No one should be thought of as scum as we are all in God’s eyes one of his children and redeemable.  We don’t have to like, however, what they do.  The main reason I write this story is to encourage readers to act responsibly by getting a second opinion when something seems too good to be true. Or, is trying to make you feel frightened.

Don’t hesitate to hang up the phone on someone who doesn’t take no for an answer. There’s a time to be polite and a time to be rude when the uninvited scammer unethically comes into your life.  No one has the right to make another person make a quick decision especially when it comes to finances.

Were the American people scammed by using taxpayer money to clean up the scum in one of our national treasures, the reflecting pool? I think I’ll write my congressman to get more information.

Rogene “Jeannie” McPherson, from the Centerville area, is a regular contributor to the Linn County Journal. Her latest book Posts from the Country, Adventures in Rural Living is available online at Amazon.com, Thriftbooks.com, and Barnesandnoble.com.