Each year, as I plant the seeds for next year’s garden, I envision the beauty that will follow as the earth warms and new flowers and plants burst forth. When I moved to this mountain home, it had a single forsythia bush, scattered daffodils, and a lone gladiola, besides the wildflowers that grew in the meadows.

In the ensuing twelve years, I have struggled with an orchard, burned-out on a massive vegetable garden (which still blesses me with perennial berries), and found my inner peace in flower gardens. These plots of color are my focus, and I try to expand their reach each year. A blossom is the epitome of God’s grace, in my view. Above all else, the time spent tending my flowers is time I give myself; it is the time of hope for a future blessed in beauty and love.

During these months before spring when everything is gray and bleak, it is sometimes hard to imagine that the palate I paint will flourish once more. I feel the same weight of spirit when I study our current political landscape and listen to my friends bemoan the idea of four more years with a president who is hell-bent on destroying our environment and civil rights. However, I’ve realized that America’s future is like a garden we all must tend, or it will lie fallow and die.

The beauty of my garden does not regenerate without care and attention from me: from hours spent planting, weeding, watering, and encouraging new growth. I know I must put forth an effort to make it happen, or I will be disappointed in the outcome. Yet with politics, I have voted and congratulated myself for being one of the fifty percent of the population that bothers to do so. Lately, I’ve realized that voting is akin to ignoring my vegetable garden and then accepting whatever perennial appears. It is all that I deserve.

I lead a life filled with must do’s, and it is difficult for me to take on anything new. I’ve dabbled in Master’s classes, trying to fit in weeknight studies with a full-time occupation and weekend obligations to family. Winter allows more time for me to do this, as spring and summer nights are spent on garden projects in the warm, longer day’s light. This year, however, I have resolved to get involved in the political process. I joined the ACLU after reading of the far-reaching threat to our rights presented by the Patriot Act, which I wrote about in last month’s column.

Besides the books mentioned last month, a few other I have recently read need mention: Arianna Huffington’s Pigs at the Trough, Al Franken’s Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, and Gerald Posner’s Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11.

These books allow us to see the pattern of America’s current ideology turning away from helping the poor and middle class to a “no-holds-barred” greed by the “ruling class’. This CEO take-over of America encourages our fears of the “bogeyman” by overwhelming us with Orange Alerts and terror threats to disrupt our focus on the real threat of what they are doing to our economy and tax structure.

I have combed the Internet to keep abreast of what is being reported in the rest of the world’s media because so much of our mainline media (owned by big business) is limited in scope. For the first time ever, I have sent money to an organization—MoveOn—to help air political commercials (and as you who read my column know, I don’t watch television) against the lies and half-truths we are currently being told to us by our government.

At work, when people speak to me of how we are going to hell in a hand basket, I ask if they voted. The majority didn’t. If they did, they voted for Bush. I ask them questions about what he has accomplished in his administration. It amazes me that they seldom know anything beyond what Fox News has reported. Often, in response to the information I have to offer on our current economic and environment problems, they say, “Well, Bush’s no different than anyone else. They’re all a bunch of crooks. At least he didn’t raise taxes!”

When I ask how much their county land appraisal went up this year, I hit the proverbial button. (Our county re-appraises land value every eight years, and many residents’ appraisal more than doubled this year.) When I explain that their state and local taxes are increasing because there is no federal aid, they don’t see the connection. (For the first time in history, when the states faced major financial crisis, the federal government did not help—and federal mandates for Homeland Security and the “No Child Left Behind” are not being supported by the administration so that these programs can be enacted realistically on a local and state level.)

There also does not seem to be any awareness on my co-workers’ part that the recent hits to Medicare and Social Security will affect the average person in this poor county, and may prevent them from holding onto their property once they reach old age. Their children will be saddled with trillions of dollars in debt incurred by the current administration, disallowing their ability to help retain and protect the family home place.

What else can I do? This year, I have hosted home meetings to present candidate’s views, and I plan to actively participate in the Democratic campaign by offering services and finances once a candidate has been chosen. I wish we had more than a two party system to encourage more points of view, but with our electoral system it is not practical.

I do believe we can turn around the destruction that has been done to our environment, economy, constitution, and international standing by electing another president. I would like to see America manifest the goodwill and love that was expressed in our nation immediately following 9/11. To help that happen, I will do all I can to support a regime change in America. I hope you will, too. And together, we will reestablish the land of the free, for liberty and justice for all—including the mother on which we reside. Long may she flower!

~ Gabrielle M. Thompson, 2004
© 2004 Gabrielle M. Thompson

Gabrielle Thompson lives with her husband Ed and daughter Lyric in the mountains of western North Carolina at Eco-Cove, a 117-acre wildlife sanctuary and trout farm. She has a degree in Anthropology and is Coordinator of Library Services at McDowell Technical Community College. Previously she helped Ed build, sail, and charter the 75’ schooner, SATORI for 14 years in the Virgin Islands. She is a freelance writer and has written two unpublished novels. In December 2002, she had an article published in Moments of Grace Magazine, with an introduction by Neale Donald Walsch.