‘Raise Your Voice’ Archives
Pondering the “Potato Bugs”
By Peter Molenaar Neighborhood gardeners have begun again to taste the harvest of their labor. The season has imposed unusual difficulties, but certainly the best is yet to come. As for my potatoes, two, fifteen-foot-long mounds are joined at one end via a semi-circle. In the semi-circle, the remnants of last year”'s red fingerlings were planted. Big potatoes occupy the main rows and will supply calories for a year. But what? Potato bugs remain among us. These “enemies of the people” are quite happy to exploit our labor while contributing nothing in return. But the savvy gardener will plant reds, knowing the eggs will preferentially be deposited there. It is then squish, squish, squish with maximum efficiency. Trust me, the karma is good. On the other hand, by way of comparison, Marxists have always condemned individual acts of terror. The recent assassination attempt, perpetrated by a lost brother, is a case in point. Whatever goodness was in the man”'s [...]
Birthing the Seed
Largest Black Bean ever? Sacred to some Native American Tribes & regarded as “poor man”'s meat” beans are rich in protein, supplying 1/3 of the essential amino acids to the corn, bean and squash trinity. By Peter Molenaar Two seasons ago, amidst the typically mottled ones, the harvest of Scarlet Runner Beans revealed two completely black seeds. In their turn, these seeds would germinate and prove to be a new mutant strain. Will the largest black bean ever grown bear my name? However, in this New World, horticultural advance must largely be credited to the practice of Native American women. This is true, because the processors of the food were also the seed savers. Her gift to us was not merely that of the various beans, but also the tomatoes, peppers, squashes, melons, potatoes, pumpkins”¦and she gave us corn! We should pity the school child who has not been introduced to teosinte, the grass from which, by her hand, corn was born. In [...]
Beyond Word Magic
In The Alley Newspaper April 2017 issue, nestled between front page columns authored by good neighbors, a letter from the President of the United States was found! If overwhelming disdain did not prevent the reading, the ensuing wall of cognitive dissonance was likely to cut it short. Yet, I read on and on”¦to discover, deep on page 8, the credit to a former president, Dwight Eisenhower. “Hey, that was his ”˜beware of the military industrial complex speech,”'” replied the editor. Okay, I sort of get that. Bush-type presidents have big investments in arms production, so we fought Osama in Iraq, or something like that, making jobless generals to build an Isis with enough poison gas to create false flags in Syria (see what Daddy can do!). However, check out Ike, line 1: “Throughout America”'s adventure in free government”¦” Oh, gosh, golly. In the beginning , white property holders convened to establish the rule of law (in preference [...]
