printContext: Our mountain neighborhood is blessed with a unique layout. The lower-neighborhood stretch faces green embankments, angled at approximately 60 degrees. This lovely midsection is abutted each side by the road.
I like my incline to be natural, which means that now, the embankment is supposed to be blanketed with wild flowers. But not if the local, progressive, statist tyrant has his way, and he always does.
It has been decreed that a close shave of the neighborhood embankments be the rule, for fear of … as Basil Fawlty would screech, “Fa-Fa-Fa-fire.” That is ridiculous, because the grass is predominantly green, and, you know, … the asphalt. It acts as a firebreak.
But progressive statists are not good at loving a neighbor as thyself (one of the Ten Commandments), which means practicing the live-and-let-live motto. Neither are progressives environmentalists. When it comes down to brass tacks, they don’t much like the natural world.
But I do.
So mow we do. But we leave the lovely embankment dotted with little alien-like crop-circles of wild flowers and grasses. And, I had a signpost made to place alongside my wild flower crop-circles. It reads:
“HELP THE BEES POLLINATE
BLACK-AND-YELLOW LIVES MATTER”
In one fell-swoop, the local progressive vigilante is being taunted for his lack of brotherly bee love. Mocking the Black Lives Matter catechism is a heresy that drives this progressive prototype more loco than he already is.
Live and let live? Naw, not with the commandment of to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Now if the Ten Commandments had Rabbi Hillel’s suggestion to do not unto others instead of the do unto and the love thy neighbor as commandments the statists would just use the illogical argument of the inquisition: I must kill you to save you. Statists have no life except to live through others. Impossible for them to find harmony in the natural world which, frankly does not give two hoots about you or me.
Matthew Yglesias, who is what passes for an intellectual among the chattering classes these days, has written a book advocating a United States with a billion citizens—soon. He’s indifferent to the outside world, prefers highrises to trees and, presumably, mountains. So yes, liberals really couldn’t care less about the birds & the trees & the pollinating bees. I suppose the skyscrapers will save us from global warming. Go ahead and put a hundred on Martha’s Vineyard today.
I certainly hope that mysterious lady in the photo, with the bee sign & the big sunglasses, will make it into the Gallery Section of this website.
That bee-keeper is me, trying to melt away on the side.
Can you provide a link to Matthew Yglesias’s barren world view?
I was enlightened a while ago about cities accounting for a statistically significant variance in the heating equation: Global warming. I thought that was very interesting insight, as the city, over-crowded Calcutta, is where the progressives want us all living, piled atop one another.
Gladly. Here is the link to Yglesias’ paean to dense living: https://www.amazon.com/One-Billion-Americans-Thinking-Bigger/dp/0593190211/ref=nodl_?dplnkId=a02e15d8-bbf5-47c5-b2e0-590aa978688c