The Sound of the Trees

I started this weblog a couple of weeks ago. I was sure that I would soon exhaust every subject I could write about. What could one say about an election that didn't turn out right? How many things could a novice like me write about?

And yet, when I go to Google and check the news, I seem to never be at a loss to find something disturbing about the direction our nation is heading. I want to pinch myself to find out it was just an awful dream that November election. I want my faith in America restored. That we should once again be that beacon of idealism, that place where each person no matter how little his means or different his beliefs can find a home.

But all that corny stuff is true. I love America more than I can tell you. And I am afraid that somehow our ship of state is steaming ahead without direction. Or in a direction that I fear is far from where we should be directing our nation.

Reading the news tonight I found one more disturbing article. Earlier today, as reported in the New York Times, "

The Bush administration issued broad new rules Wednesday overhauling the guidelines for managing the nation's 155 national forests and making it easier for regional forest managers to decide whether to allow logging, drilling or off-road vehicles.

The long-awaited rules relax longstanding provisions on environmental reviews and the protection of wildlife on 191 million acres of national forest and grasslands. They also cut back on requirements for public participation in forest planning decisions.

Our National Forests are at risk to the chainsaw. Profit over Conservation. Love of money over love of our national resources. It really makes me sick.

This is not the first time our nation has been rocked by 'robber barons'. As reported in the Christian Science Monitor:

Yet throughout the country's history, there have been men like the "Robber Barons," who believed that "government was part of the problem, not the solution." The Great Depression and the New Deal proved them at least partly wrong, when a majority of Americans came to see government as the provider of last resort.

"The country since the New Deal has been a far richer, far more economically secure, far more just society," Gordon writes. "It has been one that has proved to offer far more opportunity for all and produce far more wealth as a consequence." Indeed, the United States has been more democratic than most, its history characterized by "the tendency of new fortunes to supplant the old ones."

Oh where ARE you John Kerry? Even our trees need you to watch their backs. Pull our nation from the water, pull our trees and valleys, our rivers and skies from the threat of exploitation and destruction.

Robert Frost wrote a poem about trees:

I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door.
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on.

I wonder much about trees. I wonder about America. And the world wonders when America shall return, the America they love and remember.

Bob