Young People

As a person who is growing into the flower of years, I often find myself muttering about the world and how it is going to hell in a hand basket. My mother used to do this. It is something one does in ones later years, I guess. The only antidote I have found for aforementioned hell in a handbasket syndrome, is to be in the world with younger folk.

On Christmas this year, as my daughter and I were driving over to a holiday visit, a young man was crossing the street, a five lane extravaganza, the kind where cars go too fast and are boundries for kids wanting to explore the world, but their parents say, but don't cross (name of street).

This young man had a skate board. Half way across the street, he put the board down and glided. He stood sideways and raised his hands and head in celebration. It was a joyous moment he let the world share. Then he put one foot on the ground to push his conveyance along and went on into the neighborhood.

My next gift was a 17 month old who helped her mother and then me, empty the silverware from the dishwasher. She would hand each piece to her mother and she was very satisfied and proud to take part in this process. Her mother would take the flatware (knife, fork or spoon). Each time mother took a piece, she said "Thank you" and put the piece in the drawer where it belonged. A good time was had by all.

Diversity

Diversity

We live in a desert. It is strange to call our water wonderland a desert. I don't mean we lack rain. I mean that our species numbers are dangerously low. We have no business complaining about the rain forest when we work at creating desert right here on our own little lands by our own little castles. We mow and fertilize to our peril.

I recently let a stray milkweed that had planted itself in my driveway crack stay. In the face of my neighbor's warning, I let it stay and sure enough it planted itself all over the place. I do pull out milkweed in spring so that it doesn't take over, but it takes up less space than the space I devote to grass. The miracle of milkweed is that butterflies eat it.

I have monarchs in profusion now. This year I noticed swallowtails and skippers. I have not looked up to see if they are there because of the Great Blue Lobilia, or the New England Aster, introduced in 2004. It is hard to keep up with all of the new species I see now that I let things grow and plant cover for them. Nuthatches like cover. They are small and shy and loth to compete with the sparrows at the feeder. But if they have some shrubbery for cover, they stay in spite of the raucous house sparrows. I see them once in a while, usually in the shrubbery, flitting through on business of their own.

Looking into the relationships of what grows when and what ripens just in time for what eggs to hatch and feed, would take my whole life just to learn and then some. The complexity of my backyard; where does the toad go in dry spells and how come the snakes like to live behind the garage and what do they eat. I do not know these things. The toads breed in neighbor's swimming pools, that I do know. My daughter used to bring pollywogs home for me to look at. I raised many of them. That is to say, I provided a place for them to live where they wouldn't be dumped down the sewer. A mother American Toad has to lay many eggs in this dangerous world for only a few of her children to survive.

If toads had politics, I fancy, our vast grass covered, drained suburbs would be called third world impoverished zones for them. They'd send help to toad mothers, flies or mosquito larvae. But toads have not a prehensile thumb, and no postal service. Many of their babies go to storm sewers when people clean out their pools. I cannot say what happens to them when they are dumped into the creek, where the water is running. This is not where their mothers left them and I do not believe they will survive unless they find a eddy to live in.

It has been rewarding for me to watch the progression of things in the yard and to encourage species that long ago gave up and found more hospitable places to live, further from the suburbs. How easy it is to reclaim land. People spend much time and money maintaining lawns. They feel in charge, like Englishmen in 1910. It is a strange combination of economics and politics that formed our interest in "Keeping up our property". Even gardeners grow things that have been bred to appeal to this strange esthetic, for looks, not for the practicality of allowing diversity of species to thrive.

I would go on about species depletion and the coming crash of diversity. While the 20th century will be known for it's horrific wars, the 21st century will be known for the collapse of many environments and species depletion. It will take a million years to recover from a crash like this if we let it happen and if we are around with our prehensile thumbs to record such events. But no, onward to politics.

I have been noticing lately how our political landscape resembles our suburban one. There is no diversity. If someone comes along with a unique voice, they are either marginalized or they run for office and have to raise money. Raising money keeps them in line.

Diversity of species is an important concept to grasp and to embrace and the joy of promoting it in my backyard has enriched my life. When there is time, I like to walk or drive places and imagine what the grassy places could look like. Ford Motor Company grew sunflowers instead of grass on a large expanse by the Rouge River in East Dearborn. Talk about Buzz, there was quite a bit of it all over when the bees heard about it and came over to sip pollen. There must have been other bugs and grubs find a home there too, because you could see the finches flit over for their share of the take, just driving by.

It is easy to allow diversity of creatures on a small lot in the city, you just plant things the creatures like to eat. They eat native plants, ones that were bred in the process of trying to make a living in all of the chaos. In the natural world, all markets are specialized.

I'm thinking it is just as easy to allow the political landscape to flourish and bloom in grand diversity. It takes a great deal of energy to make a lawn grow a certain way. Every stray growing thing must be suppressed.

Letting go a little would allow stray ideas here and there. Nutritious ones would grow for others to feed on.

The one thing that has to be understood bringing the political landscape back to health. There are certain invasive ideas that keep spreading like viruses. These must not be promoted.

Our thoughts come in forms or protocols. Evolutionary Biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word Meme for a unit of cultural information that transfers from one mind to another.

In a political sense then, we have to be aware of invasive memes that do not fit our little bit of territory. These memes, like talking points, must not be spread around and allowed to take over. Just as I watch my little bit of land and learn to promote seeds and species that I find desirable and useful for my complex ecosystem, just as I promote diversity in my backyard, keeping down the invasives (buckthorn and garlic mustard which BTW is delicious in spring with a little lemon) I am thinking we must do this also in the political landscape.

As information becomes more decentralized, we will be called to do our own thinking and knowing about how to approach and order the world. In so ordering, we will be able to create complexity to buffer the winds of time. This will allow us to carry on with fewer crashes of understanding and polarization because, as we all know, we are all in this together.