Weeds

This morning Virgi and I had a chat about the state of the world and odd things that happen, and what we’ve witnessed.

One of the things we started to talk about was remembering how much we enjoyed going out into  nature to our meadow in late October and early November to find dried milkweed pods. On the day my father died in 2000, we went for a walk beside a canal in Peterborough in a wild place and I noticed some dried milkweed pods still on the bare stems of their mother plant. It was November 1, 2000 and I needed some time to decompress and begin to put things in my mind to rest and allow the grieving process to begin. I snapped a dried milkweed stem and tore off 3 pods, handing one to Virgi. She took it and was looking at it quizzically as I broke open one of mine and held it up in front of my face. I blew sharply into the pod and a cloud of parachute lofted seeds leapt from the pod into the air, draftily lazily towards the field beside us. Her eyes were questioning.

“Well, open one” I suggested.
“What’s this?”
“It’s full of little parachutes and it makes a cloud when you blow on it” I explained.

I showed her how to open it by breaking open my second one.
“Here, blow.. hard.”

She did, and a cloud of fluff lifted on a breeze and glided toward the water, drifting gently to land in the middle of the canal.

She looked at me and exclaimed, “That was fun!”.

And we did that every autumn after that for the next 14 years.

In November 2015, we were walking again, this time in our own meadow looking for the little clutch of milkweed plants that nestled by the pine forest’s edge. The patch had been there continuously since we bought the land in 2008. Milkweeds are especially hardy and they always expand their little patch to become a larger and larger patch.  Although they are classified as invasive plants we loved our autumn walks to find them and had read that these plants are hosts for the caterpillars that later become Monarch butterflies, another of our favourites.

We arrived at the spot where we were sure to find the dried stems and cloud-filled pods. No pods were visible as we approached. We assumed that the weather must have stunted the plants and that we’d see them when we were closer. We arrived at the spot where we’d always plucked the pods.

“Where are they?”, Virginia quizzed.

We both turned and looked all around. There were none to be seen. We walked father down the path to another waste area where the milkweeds had spread the previous year. There were wild grapevines and poison ivy but no milkweeds were there.
I walked out into the weedy meadow that stretched from the glen’s edge where we'd stood and wandered to the west seeking the pods. None were to be found. Nowhere on the property were they to be found.
During the next few days we walked our pet dogs along the verges of the nearby country roads and found no pods. We looked out the car windows periodically as we drove north to the city, or south to the town. All milkweeds were gone and none returned. I'd lived in that part of the world for decades, since childhood, and the milkweeds were always somewhere. There had been no talk of, nor sign of disease on plants that affected any plant, but the ash trees. We'd witnessed one of ours changing from huge green umbrella to a decaying skeletal remain within weeks.

All of the milkweed plants had disappeared as if they had never existed.

During the end of the same year, 2015, and the beginning of the following year, musicians and artists who has displayed great talents and who were also very influential had begun to die off. Yes, they weren’t young, and most people expected that the sudden wealth and extreme lifestyles of some of these artists could have contributed to early demises, but there was a definite lack of randomness at work with the obituaries that were showing up weekly.

Today as we chatted, we recalled some of their names. David Bowie, Prince, a host of great talents who had been lights in a world that was evolving away from the starched white shirts, ties, dresses at church on Sundays, who were a hope to others that people could be themselves as long as they loved and treated one another fairly, they were disappearing as well, too quickly and too many at the same time.

Earlier this year, Anthony Bourdain, a famous and outspoken chef supposedly took his own life. His mother said that there was no indication that his mood had shifted in this direction. His body was found asphyxiated in a hotel room in France. His body was found, and the decision was made.

"He killed himself",  the authorities wrote. The body was incinerated without an autopsy or investigation. This was an educated may who travelled much, was working on new ventures and had overcome many sad and difficult events in his life. There were no tales of such an overwhelmingly traumatic event that would have challenged his capacity to deal with it by means other than self-termination.

There were so many others, and I am challenged to recall all their names. The shock of their final exit and the numbers of were numbing. All that was certain about this to me was that reality does not work this way.

Then there was the cascade of cruel dictators taking over the reigns of power in countries that had  been increasingly liberated from the traditional hatreds and hurts in the east of expanding Europe. We could see that the USA was becoming increasingly rotten. We used to like to travel there and had met some lovely people there, but they did not control the country. Back 4 years ago there were occasions when we spoke with some of these fine people. They shook their heads at what was happening in the country they called their own. The could see that the ship of Liberty they’d grown up defending against the dark forces of racism and divisiveness beginning to creak and list. They were frustrated at feeling powerless.

In early 2016, a character from a reality TV show declared his intent to run for president of the USA. Millions laughed and joked about his appearance and rude demeanour.  Virginia and I sat of our deck in the spring chill and shared our thoughts.

“Do you think he could really win?”, Virginia asked worriedly.

I had to consider this at length because of course he was a buffoon, and only had such an opportunity because of his money and fame from his repulsive television show. Then, I thought, he doesn’t need to be smart. Many people have accumulated riches not because of their good character or intelligence, but through will and cruelty. My knowledge of him extended to the few episodes I’d watched of “The Apprentice”. The show didn’t inspire me to be wealthy but rather held me with the same odd curiosity that car crashes draw out.

Trump was a nasty man but he had money, was free of conscience and so manipulated people without concern. This was a bad combination. He was clearly a sociopath that had enough money he could do a lot of harm to more than he was known to have already injured. Donald J Trump, if he chose to, could enlist and hire organizational psychologists and media manipulators to do the unthinkable - draw in the people who were usually not voting, that found politics too complex and overwhelming and so stayed away from the polls.

And there was the other demographic who didn’t vote because they rarely found a candidate who was brazen enough to stand up and advocate the suppression and punishment of other citizens. They wanted to punish others for the sin of opposing the preaching of Christian fascist demagogues who had become a plague in the American pulpits. There were also the entitled and privileged denizens of the planned suburbs who resented others living their truth and not a tradition to which they had succumbed.

It was a vast demographic and conjoined with the large number s of political illiterates whose minds had been filled with the opinions of Rush Limbaugh talk-radio liars formed an untapped and dangerous public who would happily choose a dictator over democracy and human decency. This all coalesced in my mind.

Stonily, I had to predict, “Yes. He could win - and he will. God help us all.”

I’m not a monotheist, so this prediction including a plea to the god of my opponents wasn’t spoken easily, but I knew we were all in a bad place. Not just this one same-sex couple in the outback of central Canada, but us all - the humans all over the planet that only wanted to love and live and blossom, and to see and celebrate the same  blessings in their family, friends and others who have fought traditional silliness from wounded souls. We were all in trouble.

How does this all relate to the disappearance of the milkweeds, the artists who sang anthems that stirred our hearts and the accession of a soulless demagogue? Was this some post-Mayan calendar ending challenge trial of the soul that we must endure to see a better world?

In January 2008, I naively toasted the inauguration of president Obama. In 2018 I saw him and his popular wife embrace a yet-to-be-incarcerated war criminal, George W Bush. That reminded me of Standing Rock in late 2015 as I watched government-paid terrorists attack, slander and mutilate people who were protesting in Standing Rock Dakota, USA whilst Mr Obama did nothing. Later in the month, he wrote an order to stay the attacks on the brave defenders. A few weeks later, Trump was president and he wrote something else that was the order to terminate the peaceful protest in Standing Rock, “without prejudice”. The protesters were terrorized. Their camps were burned and the owners of the land they sought to protect were sent away and imprisoned.

It feels like part of an odd continuum. Of course, I now know that such cruelty and injustice has been a hallmark of the USA since its inception. The songs of freedom and liberty have been the chant of liars and fools since 1777. If their war of independence had been real there would have been no refugees except rich criminals, and they would have had topside, posh passage back to Britain. f Canada became home to thousands of people who fled violence, theft and murder from the "patriots"  that had organized and pressed common folk into war. There was no unanimity to remove the British government from the 13 colonies in what’s now the USA. Many people objected, and those who objected were not given a vote in the government change. As now, their words of the masters were that the war was for a "greater good". The war worked well for the financially well-endowed and was a huge burden on the common folk for generations afterwards. The country staggered for years in order to recover from the devastation created by the rich landowners war's effect on everyone else.

George Washington crossed the Delaware river to defeat an enemy that was sleeping peacefully on Christmas Day. A truce had been established between the American rebel army and their opponents so that all could celebrate their traditional festival of the “Prince of Peace”. The great president broke that truce, and cut the throats of the unarmed people while they slept in Trenton New Jersey. That is the real foundation of the the American property owner’s dream.

A lot of these events can be explained materialistically. Greed-fuelled violence is nothing new, and is stitched bloodily though the history of most nations. But where did all the milkweed plants go?