My tenderhearted sister continues to ask the same question these days: why is everyone in this country so angry? So full of hate? I think to myself, “Well, the larvae have hatched.” Oh, wait. You don’t know what I’m talking about. Let me back this up a bit.
When we moved to this neighborhood a few years ago, two ash trees were dying on the boulevard. Without leaves, the branches looked like scraggly arms with arthritic fingers; they worked really well as free Halloween decorations, but when winter came and their bark was mostly gone, they just became an eyesore – and a danger. The city finally came along and cut down the trees, leaving two stumps.
They had ash borer disease. The emerald ash borer (EAB) starts by eating the bark off the trees, but it will eventually kill them by laying its eggs in the trees. “When they hatch, the larvae then eat away at the tree’s vital tissues. They feed on the inner bark, preventing the tree from transporting water and nutrients properly, in turn, killing it.” (Liberty Tree & Landscape Management) In other words, they die from the inside.
There’s a lesson in that. The EAB disease seems like an apt metaphor for the United States right now. What we’ve allowed to take hold in our country is eating away at our vital tissues: our sense of community, trust in our leaders, and hope from our churches. The eggs were laid years ago with the advent of negative talk radio, shock jocks, unsubstantiated social media posts, conspiracy theories, and a general distrust of our government.
These behaviors have gone unchecked for so long that now we live in a country filled with a lot of angry people who can no longer talk to each other. Oh yeah. The larvae have hatched and are having babies of their own.
Where do we spend our time these days? Is it with nonstop talk radio? The long rants on social media? (un)Truth Social? The firehose of disinformation clogging our feeds? Propaganda shows that pass themselves off as news? All of these things destroy a community instead of building it up.
Other countries have been here before. We can ignore the lessons from 1930’s Germany or Rwanda in 1994. Or we can learn from them. Neither of those stories ended well, and the roots of their devastation came from an infestation of misinformation, propaganda, hatred, and division.
For ash trees, if no one takes control measures after infestation, all the other ash trees in the area will die within about 10 years. Likewise, if we don’t start taking corrective measures, what else will we destroy?
But here’s some hope. We had two ash trees taken out. One has remained the barren stump they left behind. But the other? It’s like it’s fighting to remake itself. A few rogue branches started growing again, and in less than a year, it looks like this. This one is just not going to give up:
And strangely, when I see that tree trying to grow again, it gives me hope for my country. Like, we can also come back again, even if everything is cut down to a bare stump. Which is what it feels like at the moment.
But what if a bunch of rogue branches started springing up all over the country? Ones that challenge the distrust, turn off the feeds, build bridges with others, repair relationships, and stand up to injustice and lies. What would that look like? “That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither.” (Psalm 1:3) Kind of like this ash tree that, after being cut down, is growing back.
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truth— well said