Are you tired of hearing chatter about Madonna’s child-adoption exploits?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Yes and the Jolie-Pitt’s can stop collecting a child in every hue, too.
I think it is appropriate for rich celebrities to open orphanages all over the world and homeless shelters, hospitals and schools, whatever, whenever. But, children should not be accessories, worn like lapel ribbons to make statements.
SNL had a funny skit about Madonna and Jolie last night. It made the same point you’re making…
When we first moved out here to the back of beyond in eastern North Carolina, our neighbors looked at us oddly when we invested so much time and energy putting in a vegetable garden. Despite the fact that we were surrounded by fields of cotton, corn and tobacco and everyone had, at least, an acre of lawn to mow, no one grew their own food.
They said, “My grandmother used to keep a garden year-round but that was before we had supermarkets out here.” They also said, “We both work full-time so we don’t have the time to mess with growing stuff.” And the truth was they knew absolutely nothing about cultivating vegetables; the knowledge had skipped a generation. Their parents had felt that toiling in the soil was beneath them. They had paychecks and could proudly afford store-bought food. Only poor people grew their own food, they thought.
With a mixture of nostalgia and curiousity, they would walk over to see how my garden was doing. I ran a low-key re-education program on them: talking up the benefits of no pesticides, no preservatives, fresh flavors, different varieties, showing them techniques they’d never seen, explaining how pick-and-pick-again increased the yields…
They were pretty sure I was going to fail and would be overcome by weeds and the heat of July. I think I shamed them a little bit, being a sickly outsider and, with hardly breaking a sweat, visting them with excess squashes and later jars of pickles and stewed tomatoes. The following Spring, half of them started gardens to compete with me.
Hubby lost his job, we lost that house and garden and spent a year and a half in a rental house. We have a new property now and are starting a new garden but attitudes have changed radically over the last three years. I drove by the old house the other day and everyone still had their gardens going. Even the couple who bought the house and insisted they were going to flatten our garden and give it back to lawn had freshly tilled it.
The local farmers’ exchange sold out of seed potatoes this year and the clerk remarked he’d never had that happen before. “Everybody’s growing gardens again,” he exclaimed. “It’s the economy,” the other clerk mused, “People are lookin’ to save money.” I hope it’s more than that. I hope it’s America turning around and re-discovering real values.