On May 1, 2019 the Monitor published a poetic legislative summary written by Jefferson County’s Rep. Greg DeVries.
It was filled with gardening analogies. Taxes and regulations were weeds, crab grass, knapweed, brambles, thistles and poison ivy; Medishame’s boulder was dropped on the tomatoes; a huge pit of infrastructure was dug in the middle of the garden. The legislature planted seeds of Godlessness, big government, entitlement, dependency and “Lenin’s Legumes,” which produced caramels and candy canes that “Dems” and pseudo-Republicans eagerly ate and who were, by the session’s end, intoxicated with compassion and calling it a bipartisan success.
DeVries conjured images of him and a few others as strong-backed men with plows and scythes who voted “No”; who whacked the hornets’ nest of DPHHS; who fended off the locusts of socialism; who called the budget a cancerous mass of vegetation; who had to rise against a tyrannical government and vote for lovers of freedom.
Elsewhere in the Monitor Rep. DeVries was reported as planning to run for re-election.
Our representative was impassioned and poetic, but calling ours a tyrannical government is overstated. I suspect that if ours was tyrannical, Devries would not have been allowed to serve in the legislature, his parody would have been burned and his party would likely have been outlawed.
I might even have been arrested for expressing ideas out of sync with government propaganda. I’ve received threatening, mean-spirited and anonymous letters for sharing unwelcome facts, but I was not imprisoned, no military snipers shot at me when I protested government policy, my mother’s home was not demolished and my party was not outlawed. Such things happen in Egypt and Israel. Our government may support elements of tyranny there, but we don’t have it here.
DeVries and I will continue to express our opinions, share our ideals and protest policies. He may even be re-elected by those who share his opinions and ideals. They differ from mine, and that is a good thing. He facilitates debate on important issues, awakens our own passionate beliefs. So let’s debate the issues, but refrain from serial name calling, like that displayed deftly by DeVries, that proves nothing. Let’s try to solve problems our legislative gardeners face. If you still want to vote for DeVries, be my guest.
I like to garden, so I recognize his flawed metaphors. Freed gardens do not produce bumper crops of tomatoes, potatoes, peas, beans, corn, carrots, beets or squashes. For the six years we worked in Germany for the U.S. military, we gave our garden freedom to grow as it wished. When we returned, we found that self-seeding lettuce, spinach, chard and mustard greens had failed to survive unregulated. Even “edible weeds” like pigweed, lamb’s quarters, chick weed, dandelion and clover had died.
To grow a healthy and productive garden, you need to set limits, routines and rules, weed out violators and build infrastructure to fend off nature’s indifference to the suffering of the vulnerable. Crabgrass, the free-market capitalist, generally takes over the economy unless someone sets limits that allow the more vulnerable to thrive in carefully tended plots. – Dean Grenz, Boulder
