PALM TREES?

 Palm trees have always been the symbolic image to all wishing and hoping, in the middle of a severe winter, to get someplace warm, where the palm trees sway in the breeze. Well, now we hear otherwise and I almost laugh. Once again, this is something I have been saying for so long. These palm trees are not what they are cracked up to be. Sorry, fellow Floridians, but facts are facts.

Those of us who live here have been warning about this for years. These trees are a danger in many ways. They do not shade anything worth a sou. Particularly if those 'pincushion' ones are planted, with a top that points up doing nothing for those on the bottom! Particularly when beautiful stretches of oxygen producing, carbon absorbing, shade giving, canopy trees are clear cut. Another development. Another street and highway widening. Another wooded area lost to greed and overdevelopment. Drainage problems, resource problems. But there go the trees we need; instead we get maybe one palm tree for tens of canopy trees? Loss of beautiful Nature, increased water drainage problems, and strain and drain on resources. By the way, the replacement trees are but a fraction, a tiny fraction, of the trees lost to us. Do not forget to include the natural beauty and variety of these trees lost to us. Palm trees? Feh!! Nowhere close!

So, as we huddle inside, sheltering against the brutal heat and humidity, we read of nor'easters, atmospheric rivers, bomb cyclones, huge life endangering  mudslides due to humongous rains in burned forest areas. Any day one can either expect to see Noah on the Ark or Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan on public service tours! 

Folks, humor is fine, but this is truly a major, existential problem for humanity, particularly those living in areas where so much abuse goes on. Shares of the remaining lands are being bought up by the uber wealthy who then close it off to the rest of the world, hoarding Nature, hoarding space, as they selfishly reap the beneficial effects possible through money. The same money they drain from the besieged middle class flowing into their pockets, in what I am told is the "Great Consolidation"  - that drainage of money in one direction only. Manifestly not yours or mine!

After the Dark Ages, after the world opened when the worst of the Plague died down, the middle class gained maneuvering room for growth, gained economic and political power, demanded rights. They expanded the world's knowledge, financing journeys, encouraging artists of all types, and thus the Renaissance. Are we going to use our 'plague' to reverse the shift in power and once again allow wealth and power, good living, into and for the Few?  

So you see, the palm tree is merely a representation of what is going wrong in our society, with our values, in the increasing tension and anger running rampant in a powerful, putrid stream throughout the world.

What can we do? We are only little, individual voices. Can we, will we, be heard? Yes, most emphatically so. Voices raised against the war in Vietnam contributed greatly to its shutdown. The anger at the loss of life, the return to a barbaric, stunted, limited life for so many in Afghanistan after twenty!!! years of war, well, that anger helped bring it to a close. The fear, anger and raised voices against the backward thinking of the GOP Party members who railed against vaccines and masks   are succeeding and/or being ignored. 

Raise our voices, send letters to representatives. Join protests. Organize. We can make our thoughts and our power known to those who want our votes. Little by little, but littles add up. Do they not? And for heaven's sake, let us get some trees back. Let us hold back on some of that development.

Voices work. Palm trees do not.