This week I had trees on my mind. It’s that time of year when I pick apples, having already enjoyed cherries and peaches that I harvested earlier this summer. Trees are remarkable. But as sturdy as they can eventually become, those we plant for their fruit require much care if they are to be healthy, strong, and productive. It struck me as I was thinking this week that some of my trees are a metaphor for life, indeed both representative and symbolic of how to nurture, strengthen, and produce a young life that exudes good character.
It’s hard to ignore these days the things occurring in America. The violence in the streets, distain for law and order, the disrespect for our Founders and the Constitution they labored to produce, and the collapse of our culture into hedonistic pursuits that—taken together—herald our national demise. It’s not a pretty picture and I find myself struggling at times to properly frame what must be done to recover our “loved thing held in common” as Saint Augustine of Hippo termed it. In his work The City of God, Augustine writes that an assemblage of people are “bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love” and in order to understand their character “we have only to observe what they love.” Our loved thing in America is freedom. But do we have the character to sustain it?
Consider trees. When you plant a tree, particularly fruit trees, you dig a hole that is twice as large as the root ball to ensure sufficient room for root growth. You then include some peat moss and well-worked soil to support the root ball and permit adequate drainage. Then you fertilize the tree to promote and sustain its growth. Eventually it will yield its first fruits, but to ensure that fruitfulness continues in the years to come and the branches are strong enough to bear the weight of that fruit, a tree must be pruned. That pruning should be done to remove branches that cross and rub against each other while ensuring that the canopy of the tree is sufficiently open to receive the sunshine if needs to help it grow and prosper.
I am not an arborist, but I’ve learned a few things about trees and I also know that in the same way that trees must be cared for, so too must we care for the character of our nation, indeed right down to each individual, particularly our youth.
That begins with how we raise our children and the character we instill in them, including the values and virtues that will help them be good people and citizens worthy of self-governance. Yet when we consider the epidemic of divorce, fatherlessness, and out of wedlock births in our nation, can we say we’re on the right path to character development? What imprints are we making on our children when we disregard the value of a home with a father and a mother in a relationship of mutual love and respect raising their children in a loving and disciplined manner? What yield—indeed—what fruit will come of that? Have we planted the next generation such that its roots will be properly set with sufficient room to grow strong and healthy? Are they bathing in the sunlight of reason and enlightenment? Sadly in the streets of America today I see a poorly rooted and self-absorbed generation that believes there are no consequences to the violence they produce.
Like trees, pruning is needed. Damaged and broken branches need to be discarded. That means rejecting the influences on our youth that hamper their healthy growth. It means cutting out the bad growth to make room for healthy branches. That requires a genuine education system that emphasizes objective truth, history in its full context, and civics that promotes a proper understanding of what our republic was designed to do. That we have produced a generation that has embraced socialism and rejected Constitutional freedoms says much about the nature of what they have been taught and those instructing them.
And what fruit have we picked from the trees we have so poorly cared for? Much of the fruit we harvest today is spoiled, deformed, and diseased the moment it is harvested. Fortunately, people are not trees, and the fruit they yield in life can be salvaged, if the rising generation is made aware of the need to properly plant, prune, and pick good fruit from the trees of life.
We have much to do in American to protect our loved thing held in common, freedom. And that begins with the character we plant in our children, the pruning we do in their development, and the paths they pick to yield the healthy fruit of good character.
PS: SPECIAL REQUEST! I have a BIG favor to ask of you. If you have read my book Desert Redleg: Artillery Warfare in the First Gulf War and have not yet gone to Amazon or Good Reads or Books-A-Million or Barnes and Noble to write a review, I hope you will and give it a great rating. COVID has delayed positioning books in book stores. So your efforts now to write a good review will help me reach more people. Please do this soon! And if you haven’t read my book, I hope you will. Thanks!
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