So, just how does your garden grow these days?

Posted: Friday, April 5, 2013 8:00 pm
By: by Glenda Caudle

The Messenger 04.05.13

It’s not that we are green-thumb gardeners, my husband and I.
We’re not. But we are committed to working at it. For him, the effort began when he was barely in his teens. For me, a couple of years later, although I was still a high school student.
So for almost a half century, we have labored to bring forth a crop that would sustain us and our children, would enable us to teach them something about the importance of planting and tending and reaping and would allow us to set aside some of our produce for that time when it might not be possible to harvest on our own any more.
Most of you were probably raised the same way.
Some years were better than others. Sometimes we didn’t have any flowers at all and we could barely dig up enough beans and taters to meet our needs. Other times, we had so much we couldn’t possibly consume it all and the blossoms on the portion of our garden set aside purely for aesthetic purposes were overwhelmingly beautiful.
We heeded the ultimate Gardener’s call to share our harvest, like so many of you, and we have felt blessed that we could do that through several different avenues and in more abundance than we would have previously thought possible.
We’ve also watched with awe and gratitude from the sidelines as other gardeners gathered in the results of their hard labor and then passed around what they had worked so diligently to produce in a variety of ways and to fill a variety of appetites.
Some of what has been shared has been sustenance for the body, some for the spirit. Whatever the offering, it reinforced the ideals we had been raised with — those that reminded us we were blessed to be part of a community, indeed, part of a nation, whose commitment was to diligence and generosity — and encouraged us to follow the example.
But somewhere along the line, something changed.
Someone took over our gardens.
It began innocently enough. We simply allowed these usurpers to shovel sweet smelling fertilizer over our ground with the assurance it would bring forth beautiful blooms. They promised us magnificent rose gardens. We believed them.
More fools, we. For now, to our sorrow and shame, we are discovering the crops these new gardeners cultivate have little to do with nurturing body or spirit and much to do with producing thorns that draw blood when we attempt to walk in increasingly barren fields that were once filled with a bountiful supply of good fruit.
These new gardeners have consistently weakened our crops and diminished most yields with gardening practices that have repeatedly failed wherever they have been tried. To add insult to injury, they also seize an ever increasing portion of the fruits of our labor for those who have, in some instances, refused to plant their own gardens, and then berate us for pointing out the cultivation practices they insist on and the division of labor policies they command can only lead to disaster.
In case the metaphor has been too vague for you, let me spell it out.
For the past few years we have seen the policies of our nation take larger and larger chunks of our productivity and apply those resources to questionable programs and clearly unsustainable policies designed to win votes. That Washington-based, socialist-inspired determination to reward a lack of individual initiative and effort, to destroy the family unit that ultimately is the cornerstone of social stability, to deride and impede efforts at self-sufficiency, to sneer at and then actively practice intolerance toward faith and to so negatively regulate the principles of economics that free markets shudder rather than thrive has largely negated all our best efforts to provide for ourselves and then willingly assist those who are unable to labor on their own behalf.
The government’s determination to inflict socialistic policies on this country has yielded a tragic harvest of thorns and thistles and stinging nettles. But what makes the sharp and stinging growth gouge especially deep and burn with deep-seated fire is this: the day-to-day effort to portray those of us who do not support these Godless and consistently ineffective plans as somehow greedy, grasping, racist, ignorant and evil. This attempt is a staple of a hard-left leaning administration, the sycophantic media who not only do not question but actively bury information about their activities, the pop culture divas with more body parts they are willing to display than common sense they can rely on and the academic elitists who skew the lessons we pay them to teach our children toward their own morally bankrupt world view.
When I look at the things being done in my community to help those in need who cannot help themselves, it is those people so maligned by those enamored of a Marxist outlook who are actually making a positive difference with their time, energy, talent and money.
I write about their commitment on a regular basis. I see the results of their effort and ideas. I contrast what they do with what they are accused of doing, what they are with what they are falsely berated for being, what they support with what their faultfinders destroy.
They are what keep me from completely losing faith in a country whose leaders have ignored history, usurped the roles of deity and carefully cultivated bitterness and hatred among the citizens for their own purposes.
I simply wonder how long it will be before those committed to helping with their own resources are bled dry by the deep gouging thorns cultivated by those who are content to plant barren seed themselves.
I am amazed at the ignorance and short-sightedness of those charged with tending a garden that once yielded bumper crops. But I am even more confounded by the people who not only hired them to do the job but continue to reward their shameless inability to produce a worthwhile harvest.
For just how long will we be satisfied with thorns and thistles and nettles when we could be enjoying sweet, good fruits?

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