Every year I do a garden, and every year I say, "I'm never doing this again." Between the woodchucks and the deer, even with fences and traps, it just gets decimated. This year it was six out of seven fruit trees that got stripped, and all my tomato plants. I have visions of bringing in wheelbarrows of fresh produce to the house. This year, will get a few bucketloads of Asian Pears, and only because they are high enough up that the deer couldn't get them.
When I saw the Portland riots on the news last year and caught the Utopian attempts to be self-sufficient (or whatever it is they were doing) in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), I couldn't help but laugh. It looked like something from a Mad Max movie, but just underscored that liberals are not living in the real world, but a perceived reality totally in congruent with what is required to sustain it. Replete with a little CHAZ garden (it's fruitful bounty picture below), which was eventually leveled by a homeless man, there was a little part of me that sympathized because I knew the feeling of having everything you worked so hard for with such idealism so haplessly destroyed.
Let it be a lesson, though. We live in a fallen world. We can also do nothing apart from grace. St. Augustine spoke to this in his letters against the Pelagians, who regarded man capable of attaining sanctity apart from grace. Let it also speak to reason, that man's nature is perfected by both grace and the faculty of reason which we employ as a gift from God, not to be cast out as the Protestants maintain (we are not saved by faith alone). And to try to be sanctified apart from baptism is a fool's errand as well.
I still recall a great commentary I read in The Federalist about five years ago that seemed to describe this so well in a political context:
"I hate to say William F. Buckley was right, but I think it’s all about immanentizing the eschaton.
The “eschaton” is a term from theology, where it refers to the ultimate end state of creation—basically, what will happen after the final judgment. So “eschatology” speculates about the nature of heaven and God’s final plans for mankind. Outside of theology, the “eschaton” is a stand-in for the final, ideal goal we’re hoping to reach.
There are three basic views of what this ideal state is: the supernatural, the individual, and the social.
In its original context, for the traditional American Christian, the “eschaton” is supernatural: it is life in heaven. That means it’s something that will happen regardless of the state of this wicked world, and your place in it is dependent on you and your own inner spiritual state, not on other people. Hence the Christian’s confounded complacency. If I’m not on board with his religious vision, well, that sucks for me when the Rapture comes. Because my religious critic is a nice guy, he’ll pray that eventually I see the light and accept Jesus into my heart. But at the end of the day (or of history), it’s no skin off his soul.
For someone like me, who is not religious but an individualist, the ultimate end state I am seeking is in my own life. It’s about my family, my work, my home, my own personal interests. The goal I’m seeking is about things I have a lot of control over, much more than it is about other people. Politics is mostly just something that gets in the way of the real business of life. Our ideal end state is that we can reach the point where we’re able to think about our own lives and not have to care about politics any more.
For the secular leftist, the end state is social and necessarily political. It is all about getting everybody else on board and herding them into his imagined utopia. There are so many “problematic” aspects of life that need to be reengineered, so many vast social systems that need to be overthrown and replaced. But the rest of us are all screwing it up, all the time, through our greed, our denial, our apathy, our refusal to listen to him banging on about his tired socialist ideology.
For the Christian, the ideal end state is safely in the next world and therefore is never in doubt. For the individualist, it’s in his own life, and it’s mostly under his direct control. For the leftist, however, it is all outside his control. It requires other people, a lot of other people, and those SOBs usually refuse to cooperate. Talk about rage-inducing.
If the whole focus of your life is on getting everybody else to agree with you on every detail of your politics and adopt your plans for a perfect society, then you’re setting yourself up to be at war with most of the human race most of the time.
Which means an awful lot for the Angry Left to get angry about."
Nature is a cruel adversary. When I think of the lushness of the Garden through which God walked in the cool before the Fall, and contrast it with the toil and forces to contend with as we try to raise our daily bread now, it's enough to know that we can do nothing apart from grace, and that such perfection will never take place this side of Heaven. We keep trying and failing to do it ourselves, to create our little utopias. But sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words.
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