In high summer I love to go to my garden, especially early enough in the day that birds are still busy bringing breakfast to their young, and bees are still sleeping in my squash blossoms. On the way there I brace myself for the fact I may well find bean beetles have devoured my pole beans, deer have browsed the tops off my tomato plants or mildew is silvering and wilting the leaves of my bee balm and pumpkin vines. These and countless other dastardly deeds might have occurred overnight. Or not.
I love this time of year in the garden. But experience has taught me that I should assume nothing. I see tomatoes plump and promising on the vine one day, and the next day the ripe fruits closest to the ground have had enormous chunks deftly removed by hungry voles or other creatures sharing my garden with me. I discover that my budding marigolds have been attacked by cutworms, with hardly a bud remaining. I spy weeds a foot tall that I am sure were not there yesterday. With fewer than 100 days left in the growing season, I need to stay vigilant.
The other day I almost ran into a spider web suspended between two sunflower stalks. The web was shuddering with the efforts of a fairly large moth trying to free itself. I imagined that the spider was gloating nearby, although I didn’t see him.
As I carefully find footing on pathways that in the spring seemed broad enough, but are now almost invisible beneath exuberant plants, I find myself grounded and hopeful. But I still can’t help but draw analogies, in these grim days, between what I see in the garden and what I hear in the news.
Today I can’t get that spiderweb out of my mind. A big moth, torn between hope and despair. In my imagination, that moth becomes our fragile democracy caught in a trap our forefathers only dimly anticipated.
Our current president spins an ever-tighter web. He’s putting the squeeze on his party to skew the upcoming midterm elections his way — didn’t he promise that voting for him and his people would relieve our democracy of ever having to hold an election again? He’s forced out those who dare to stand up to him in even the slightest way and replaced them with sycophants ready to sell their souls to do his bidding. He’s brazenly forced his people to uneven the playing field by gerrymandering election districts. He’s begging the Supreme Court to eliminate mail-in ballots, even though he himself has voted that way. And finally, he’s touting the SAVE Act as mandatory for election “integrity.” I see him gloating like a spider as he awaits his meal.
The SAVE Act is the stickiest thread in his election rigging trap. In fact, the perceived threats he wants us to fear, like noncitizens participating in our elections, are virtually nonexistent under our current system. Some have said that the country would be safer and better off if he applied the SAVE regulations to people who want to own a gun rather than to citizens who want to exercise their civic duty to vote.
Imagine it: a REAL ID would not be enough to purchase or own a gun, just as he’s insisting it’s not enough to register to vote. You’d have to bring a birth certificate or passport and register for a National Gun Registry. Heaven forbid you have changed your name and it doesn’t match the documents you bring. And you’d have to hope that the government doesn’t purge your name, as it would do periodically with its National Voter Registry (with a 30%-40% error rate). If you’ve been purged from either registry, you would need to return in person with proper documentation and wait until the next election or gun cycle before becoming a voter or a gun owner. Now whose meal is caught in the web?
As I think about the moth caught between the sunflower stalks, I am hopeful that he’s big enough to escape. A system that has prevailed for 250 years has endured because people over the centuries have worked very hard to make it work and keep it working.
My part in affecting the outcomes of the upcoming midterm elections is small, but I’m not alone. To protect our democracy, we need to act together like vigilant gardeners. We can pick off those bean beetles, pull out those weeds and watch for the first sign of cutworms. We need to carefully water and mulch and enrich the soil of our tomato plants to make sure there are enough tomatoes to share. And we can break the snare that’s trapping the moth, and watch it flutter away, tattered but still strong.
Let’s get busy. We have fewer than 100 days.
Millie LaFontaine is a retired neurologist who lives in Concord.