Embrace Being Weeds
Mary Conley
Spring in Eugene, where the soil lends its magic to weeds as well as rhododendrons. My garden was planted by the previous owner who must have had a LOT of energy, so I'm trying to just keep up with the weeds this week. Being an Umbrella Oregonian, I didn't get out and uproot them in the rain as I should have done a few weeks ago. I was lazy and now I'm paying the price.
But as I've been working hard to eliminate The Enemy, I've realized gardening and politics do have something in common.
I'm out there in the dirt with my trowel, fork, and long stick thing for dandelions. I methodically go from yellow flower to yellow flower, desperately trying to get the entire root and failing. Then there's this other weed that spits out seeds right in your face as you uproot it. It's the Osama Bin Laden of weeds. Chop off its head and you get hundreds more. I've developed a technique whereby I smother the heads with both of my hands (holding back at least a few seeds), pull it up, then go back later for the roots. It's the kind of weed that makes you curse at it as you swallow its seeds. Then you realize neighbors might hear you, so you mutter more quietly...
But between the dandelions and the seed shooter, I think I've got the essence of how we need to think about getting our ideas out. Grassroots are passe. You can dig up a yard of grass with a backhoe, pave it over and put a WalMart on it. But dandelions... you take that backhoe, you THINK you've pulled them up, you pave them over, you put up WalMart. But sooner than you'd ever imagine, that root comes back up, finds a crack in WalMart's foundation and takes the whole thing down. THOSE are the kind of roots we need to develop when the stakes are this high. Maybe that's what this whole internet/blog thing's about: honing our ideas, connecting people who think like us, and implementing strategies (that we'll need to prove in the coming months) to win. We need to make the arguments for our ideas that will speak to the next generation like our parents made to us. My father was in the Navy, but he knew Vietnam was wrong and said so. We need to find our core beliefs, express them well and stick with them.
And when they try to pull us out, we need to spit our ideas in their faces and know that a hundred more will sprout from them later.
Chauncey Gardener, where are you when we need you?
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Apr 27, '06
Another analogy: Karl Rove is like a malicious person who puts weed seeds in your yard.
Ignore his actions, and your lawn will be full of weeds, and ruined. That means that Dems must act quickly and forcefully against the Republican Slime Machine this fall.
Expect Rethugs to unleash ads and whispering campaigns linking Dems to being soft on terrorism, or that Dems will turn your kids into homosexuals. Time to link the Rethugs to the botched response to Katrina, the quagmire in Iraq, snatching failure from the jaws of success in Afghanistan, and incompetent foreign and domestic policy.
I remember the gas lines of 1979-1980 and how everyone blamed (I almost said "Plamed") Jimmy Carter for them. I want everyone to blame Bush/Cheney and their oil industry buddies for $3/gallon gas now and $4/gallon gas come election time. Turnabout's fair play.
May 2, '06
Instead of a dandelion, I'm visualizing becoming knotweed. I dug a six foot trench eight years ago to uproot a clump that was planted by the previous owner and I still find stalks wiggling their way towards the sun every year. The best part is, it also comes up acros the street in my neighbor's yard, despite their use of chemical weedkillers.
I guess the message is that if your roots are deep enough, even if you're paved over and spend years in the dark, you can keep coming back even among the enemy. And it's in the enemy camp we need to send our shoots and seeds up into. If you're the dandelion and I'm the knotweed and someone else is chickweed or morning glory, not only do we have deep enough roots, we have definitive enough issues to affect the people who don't already believe like we do.
<h2>Leigh Anne</h2>