Pecan trees can grow as tall as 100 feet with a productive life of 40 years. But 40 is average. In 2017, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas became home to a “champion” pecan tree – one of the nation’s tallest and oldest. Recorded by Lewis and Clark as a “tall tree” in 1804 during their explorations along a river near the present site of Fort Leavenworth, this tree is over 200 years old and towers to 130 feet.
My grandmother’s pecan tree in Charlotte, N.C. stood about 40 feet tall when I was growing up in the ’60s. When she bought the property in 1962, she was told the tree was 75 years old.
When my grandmother died in 2004 at age 82, that tree still loomed over the back yard of the 13,500-square-foot lot behind her once rickety 796-square-foot home that my uncle rebuilt in ‘68. It’s a bit of a shock that the tree is still standing because 10 years ago, it was dying.
On one of my nostalgic visits, I noticed the tree was in really bad shape. Bug-infested pecans. A smattering of leaves. Wilted and broken branches. Death was settling in. Why? Old age? Disease? Weevils? Hickory twig girdlers? Cicada? No.
It turns out that at the base of the tree, an aggressive weed was flourishing. Growing at nearly a foot a day, the weed invaded the yard, anchored its nodes into the ground, pushed its roots down deep, and guzzled in all of the soil’s nutrients. With nourishment to thrive, this twining weed embedded its nodes into the base of the trunk and started encircling up the tree at a demonic pace.
Our mighty pecan tree was being starved and strangled to death by a murderous invasion of neglected weeds. This creepy weed, we learned, was Kudzu – a fast-growing, semi-woody climbing vine that’s legendary in plant lore as “the vine that ate the South.” Native to China (it figures), Kudzu was brought to America as a gift from Japan at the Centennial International Exposition of 1876. It’s still with us; threatening and killing plant life.
Since the very nature of the weed was to kill our tree, coddling it was not an option. It had to be eradicated. Had we just sat and watched the mayhem, the Kudzu would’ve killed plant life on every inch of the property and spread to kill plant life in neighboring yards.
“It (Kudzu) will quickly grow to cover all other plant life and prevent any beneath it from receiving the sunlight it needs to survive,” according to an article written by an Atlanta-based tree service. “Simply put, if you have Kudzu beginning to spread across your yard or landscape, you need to take action right away to remove it before it kills everything in its path!”
What Kudzu is to plant life, crime is to civil society. When crime is allowed to flourish, civility dies. You can’t have both. Crime is flourishing in America today because the people we hired to contain it, feeds it, then punishes the people trying to stop it. The same people are forced to acknowledge that crime is a serious problem because it’s now so obviously out of control. But they’re pretending not to know how that happened.
Jen Psaki attributes it to COVID and “a range of reasons.” Oprah says we need more “love.” Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, blames storeowners.
Even Nancy Pelosi, the Queen of Hearts of the anthropomorphic political creatures inside the Woke Washington Wonderland, said she’s baffled over why crime is anchoring its nodes in cities across America.
“It’s absolutely outrageous,” said the woman who splurged the country’s energy on a phantom Russian collusion, sham impeachments, and the Jan. 6 commission. “Obviously, it (crime) cannot continue. But the fact [is] that there is an attitude of lawlessness in our country that springs from I don’t know where – may you know – and we cannot have that lawlessness become the norm. … It must be stopped, and it’s not just in San Francisco; it’s in our entire country.”
Hey Nancy, it’s not rocket science. You used race, George Floyd’s death, COVID, and Trump hatred to dismantle the social controls that contained and discouraged crime.
Defund the police. Bail reform. Reducing “mass incarceration.” Cheering looters and rioters. Opening borders to millions of illegals. Validating the deviant, anti-American BLM and Antifa organizations. All the while ignoring the elephant in the room: violent crime committed by fatherless young black men from broken and dysfunctional families.
It’s all creating a stitched-up Frankenstein of human Kudzu that woke elites can no longer control. And they’re nervous. The “attitude of lawlessness” that they brought to life can live without them now, and it’s spilling from troubled neighborhoods into safer ones. It’s invaded high-end stores. It’s even reached Oprah’s friend.
“Jacqueline Avant was the classiest, kindest, and most calming presence,” wrote Oprah wrote, who believes that blacks are at the bottom rung of a caste system in America. “The fact that this has happened, her being shot and killed in her own home, after giving, sharing, and caring for 81 years has shaken the laws of the universe. The world is upside down. And deeply in need of some love today.”
No, Oprah. The laws of the universe are unalterable. You reap what you sow. It’s not more misplaced compassion disguised as “love” that we need. With crime out of control, the world is deeply in need of more punishment.
We can’t go around “eradicating” people, but civil society must put an apparatus in place that puts the fear of God in people who are inclined to succumb to the criminal instinct. America must move aggressively to put the social controls back into place that contain and discourage crime before law-abiding people are forced to take the law into their own hands. If we do nothing, or we do too little, that will be inevitable.
And perhaps we can look to that 130-foot, 200-year-old “champion” pecan tree at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas as a symbol of the national longevity that’s possible when we create the environment for the country’s vital virtues to thrive. After all, Fort Leavenworth is also home to the military’s only maximum security prison for male servicemembers convicted of court martial, plus two other major prisons.
Civil society cannot thrive in freedom if we allow crime, like Kudzu, to flourish. We cannot let death settle in! Why? Because none of us want our grandchildren to be burdened with the mess that this woke generation is trying to force down our throats. How? We’ll figure it out. We’re still Americans.
Coddling crime is nuts. And we all know it.