Garden of Democracy
by Alan Bisbort

July 2, 2003 -- HARTFORD (apj.us) -- It struck me the other day, as I plucked weeds from among my tomato, bean and pea plants, that a political system is much like a garden. If you want to maintain its health and integrity, you must pluck the weeds and eradicate the parasites and grubs. You must not pluck a few here and a few there when the spirit moves you. As every gardener and farmer knows, you must make a constant, concerted, and vigorous effort. It is hard work, but the results are more often than not-barring an unforeseen natural calamity-well worth the efforts.

And the alternative is unthinkable. That is, if you do not do the above, your crops will be of poor quality, small, withered, splotchy, infested with worms, rotten or simply dead on the vine.

We are currently harvesting a crop of the latter description in our political system. As a result, we are at a tipping point of our nation's garden of democracy. We can give up, allow the garden to be claimed by the kudzu of state-sponsored repression and one-party totalitarian rule. We can return to that featureless mosquito-infested swamp of world empire, religious intolerance and taxation without representation that existed before the American experiment was begun in 1776. As Norman Mailer recently noted, maybe our democracy was an experiment that failed, and maybe fascism is the more natural state of mankind.

True, giving up is the easier course in the short-term, to simply allow Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rice, Rove, Wolfowitz and Delay to, like political date rapists, have their way with us. This is especially true when there's still plenty of relatively cheap food on the table, even if it is genetically modified, carcinogenic, fattening and yet never seems to sate one's appetite, and plenty of relatively cheap Iraqi gas to put in our gigantic gas-guzzling cars, even if the emissions are destroying the ozone and depleting a finite resource for which American soldiers are now dying. And so on.

But, as I have noted in this space before, giving up out of exhaustion and/or fear is the mindset of an abuse victim. And I stand by my earlier contention that we are, indeed, being abused by our government, its corporate (read: global imperialist) donors and its fundamentalist Apocalypse-worshipping supporters. We are also suffering from taxation without representation the results of which will be a catastrophic deficit, the largest in U.S. history (and growing!), that is guaranteed to wreak havoc on the lives of our children and grandchildren. We are being repressed, demonized, bullied and jailed for our dissent.

Is this a garden you want to call your own?

If it is not, then we can, and must, get in and begin weeding and tilling. And when I say "we," I am not talking about liberals and progressives and Democrats and Greens. I am talking about your parents and your grandparents and your siblings and your spouses and your coworkers and your neighbors and your acquaintances. Some of these people may have voted Republican or be registered Republican. We must reach out to them, not to vengefully harangue or demonize them but to hand them a hoe and invite them into the garden.

Finally, we must begin composting and preparing for next year's crop, because it is too late to put anything in the ground this season. Next year will be our garden's proving ground. That is, should the current status quo be allowed to remain in place in 2004, our democracy will be a lost garden, a plot of infertile ground, a patch of uncontrollable weeds. It may not even be worth saving by 2008. We may have to start a new garden elsewhere.

It is that simple. The vines that will grow from that dead earth will be an insult to the blood and sweat of our forebears. They will also be a mockery of our most cherished documents, which were the most beautiful human-cultivated fruit that had, until late 2000, ever seen light on this planet.

This is no simple-minded metaphor. This is the truth. A garden never lies. As the good book says, one reaps what one sows.

Alan Bisbort is a columnist for the Hartford Advocate. His most recent book, written with Parke Puterbaugh, is California Beaches, 3rd edition (Avalon/Foghorn Outdoors).