The Tree of Life

The felling of my mother’s neighbor’s tree is a sign of the changing times, particularly in our area.  Riverdale, Washington and Federal Hills are all disappearing due to ongoing activities of the local rock quarries, which mine a rare granite that is useful in building.  Trees are either dying due to age, or residents are cutting them down to accommodate satellite dishes.

Environmentalists might cry foul over cutting trees down to clear the way for satellite dishes, but then, they only have themselves to blame.  In their anti-capitalism hysteria, they created monopolies for cable companies, meaning customers had no choice as to what cable provider they could choose.  That is until satellite dishes came along.  But in a wooded, weather-challenged area like Northern New Jersey, reception is difficult.  Garden Staters are doggedly determined to have their freedom of choice, though.  Had the Liberals left things well enough alone, as the cliché goes, residents would have had a choice of remaining with over-the-air broadcasts, or their choice of cable providers.

There are more cable service providers now, but the pricing was already at such a high rate, due to the long lack of competition and fierce demand for the product, that people are still cutting trees down in order to get the television they want.

Some residents who can’t afford a tree-cutting service simply allow Mother Nature to do the job.  They see vines clinging to the live tree and allow the vine to strangle the tree to death.  Vines are really ugly things.  Once they establish themselves, they drop their leaves and become these ugly, log-like things, like something out of a Star Trek movie.  I make it my duty to stop the vines on the trees along the riverbank.

Our bureaucratic government is very much like those vines.  Though vines are a part of nature, just as vicious tornados, bureaucracies are a man-made, political creation designed for one purpose – to strangle freedom.

Agenda 21 is a vine that targets many trees.  It’s not just about saving the trees or the air or water.  In fact, they don’t care one whit about the wild animals or the flora or fauna that they admit they haven’t any statistics on.  Agenda 21’s prey is man.  The family of man.  The family, in short.

That is their object in promoting “female reproductive rights” and “female reproductive justice.”  The Liberals consider the family unit a threat and a danger to the environment in general.  Human activity, in their opinion, needs to be curtailed, wiped out even if necessary.  They talk, in “Our Common Future” about the extinction and endangerment of seeds and genetic material of flora and fauna.  One species whose extinction, or at least control, is man’s.

Their object since the Sixties has been Zero Population Growth.  A growing population leads to the “exploitation” of resources and creates “poverty.”  On the other hand, they also admit that growing population leads to increased work forces, increased productivity, better health and better education.  North America, they regretfully acknowledge, has enough food to feed the world three times over.  America has created productive communities and that’s not a good thing, in the opinion of Liberals, because tribes in Africa haven’t done the same thing, and their starving.

Children are dying of malaria in Third World countries.  Of course, DDT had helped solve that problem, until the environmentalists banned the chemical.  DDT allowed Third World populations to grow and prosper and that meant competing in a capitalistic world and that wouldn’t help the Marxist cause at all.

Margaret Sanger’s invention helped alleviate the problem of overpopulation in the Third World, through government implementation.  Here, in 1950s America, it was a more difficult soul.  The Marxists had to create discontent among the female population. They needed a way to break up those happy families.  World War II had created an opportunity for women to break out of the home and into the workforce.  The war ended, and Fifties women happily returned to home and family.

So the feminists began agitating for equal pay for equal work.  My mother was ahead of them by about 20 years.  She’d already been there and done that.  The feminists denigrating the title of mother and homemaker.  Mom and Dad recognized it as communism; it was the tact the Soviet Union used to control Russian families.  Women were lured out of their home and into the working with the promise of riches and equality.  Never mind that the Bible already declared men and women equal in the eyes of God.  Male machinery envy was very useful, as was the age-old Battle of the Sexes.

Women had to do all the work.  Women had to bear the pains of childbirth.  Women had to change the diapers.  Women had to do the laundry, and the cooking, all for no money.  Women had to wear high heels.  Women had to deal with the weight gain that came with childbirth.  Women have an inborn propensity to complain and demand sympathy; the Liberals were happy to oblige them.

No one ever asked about the sacrifices men made, particularly in defending freedom.  Men take the greater physical risk in the harder household chores.  Until women demanded to be released from the home, men had to bear the stresses of the workplace and provide for their families – alone.  Having both spouses work made sense in the respect that it provided better financial security.  But at a dreadful cost to family life, especially extended family life.

Up until the Women’s Rights movement, families took care of their elderly or troubled relatives.  Women no longer had the time or desire.  Their rise in the workplace gave to a certain amount of pride and arrogance.  Looking after their own children was a waste of their valuable time.  Better to hire some lesser educated person to care for the children.  They even deceived themselves that it was better for their children.

Having fewer children meant more disposable income and more things they could buy for themselves and their progeny.   Most modern young women do consider childbirth a painful nuisance and are only too happy to support women’s reproductive rights.  Hence, the censorship of Rush Limbaugh in this matter of the Georgetown Law student, who has been revealed as a reproductive rights activist and specifically chose Georgetown because of its policy towards providing contraception as part of health care.

People don’t want government minding their business, but that’s exactly what’s happened.  Women have bitten a new apple and considerably lowered the value of life below a new car, a bigger house, and Caribbean vacations.  Thoughtless young college students enjoy their promiscuous lifestyle all the more because it flouts traditional, Conservative morals.  Smart Growth planners happily point to studies that say young people would prefer to live in urban dwellings where they would not be able to raise children easily or properly, and where a casual, hedonistic lifestyle would be easier to carry out.

What children are borne are hastily warehoused in convenient nursery schools where they’re taught that man is evil and traditional families are no more normal than any other kind, that there are all kinds of families.  The Liberals think nothing of guiding impressionable teens towards a homosexual lifestyle, at a time of life when they scarcely know what they really are, that will guarantee a reduction in population without the messiness and gore of war.

Liberal progressivism is that ugly, vine headed straight for the tree of life.  The vines roots are very deep, its trunk immensely strong, and its tentacles have been wrapped inexorable around the tree of life for at least three generations – indeed, since the time of Marx himself.

We should pity the Liberals.  In their lack of faith, they cling to a mortal, dying world that can offer no salvation from death.  They think by strangling freedom that they can save their mortal lives.  They have nothing else.  They want nothing else and resent any proof that there is more to life.  They accuse Conservatives of being materialistic.  But it is they who are guilty of the most banal, lewd materialism.  They are luring us towards societal suicide.  When they have brought us to that brink, they will offer us the hand of tyranny to save us.

It will take the effort of many strong arms to hack away at that vine in order to save this tree.  Cut it we must, though; our freedom, our way of life, our civilization, in fact, our very lives, depend upon it.