Your Manicured Lawn Is Racist And Contributing To Climate Change
Do you mow your yard (in warm weather presumably)? Do you pull weeds out of your manicured lawn? You should really stop. If you care about people. But, as a lawn colonizer, you probably hate people.
Once again, a traditional symbol has become a target of those who attack private property rights and the American way of life. In this case, the symbol is the lawn – those closely-cropped grassy areas that surround our single-family homes.
Water is used to irrigate grass more than any other plant in the country. And that’s bad, because it could be used to take shorter showers and grow algae for the bulb-nosed blue-bottomed frog.
Some environmentalists, First Nations leaders and even hobby gardeners are calling for a different approach to how we view and treat the ubiquitous urban green space (lawns). It is, they argue, a lasting symbol of how settlers appropriated Indigenous land and culture. And the rigid Western ideal we have imposed continues to hurt the planet and, in turn, all of us. The lawn, they say, needs to be decolonized.
Lawnmowers also pollute the air and cause climate change. Listen to John Douglas Belshaw, a ‘woke’ Canadian history professor (redundant, I know) at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C.
"Lawns are a huge part of settler culture. You see that river there? We can dam that. We can organize that water, we can make that water work for us. It's essentially the same mindset. I can reorganize this landscape, flatten it, plant lawn, find a non-indigenous species of plant, of grass, and completely extract anything that's not homogenous, that doesn't fit with this green pattern and control it ... A backyard with a big lawn is like a classroom for colonialism and environmental hostility."
"Arguably, in our urban areas, it [the lawn] is kind of the largest ecosystem," says Dan Kraus, a senior conservation biologist at the Nature Conservancy of Canada.
And that's a large problem, because a monocrop of grass – which is what most lawns are – is vulnerable to disease and drought, and can act as an ecological desert.
Mr. Kraus compares plants to people,
"These unknown plants that you think are all weeds but when you actually get to know them, they have their own stories and are as wonderful as any other plants."
Did you hear that? Instead of pulling our weeds, we should get to know them, listen to their stories. After all, weeds are people too.
Additionally, David Botti makes the link to racism. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson planted large lawns at their estates. These lawns were planted and maintained through the labor of enslaved people.
That settles it. We should ban lawns. And grass. And cotton T-shirts and sheets, and boats, and iron, and pancakes, and syrup, and clothes, and tools, and water (that the boats floated on) and rice and horses and dirt and fields. And wind too. Wind was used to power boats in those days.
This is why I don’t believe in the privilege/victimhood game, because it’s irreducible. It has no stopping point. You can’t ever finish the game. There is always an even crazier idea lurking around the corner from one of these frenzied fearmongers.
The success story of the American family home is too secure to be attacked frontally. Most Americans still aspire to homeownership. Thus, the left attacks this institution by way of symbols. An attack on the lawn is a subtle way of attacking private property while professing politically correct motives for their opposition.
They don’t care, and may not even know that God told us to:
“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Mathematics is Racist
The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) recently encouraged teachers to register for training that encourages "ethnomathematics" and argues, among other things, that white supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer.
An ODE newsletter sent last week advertises a Feb. 21 "Pathway to Math Equity Micro-Course," which is designed for middle school teachers to make use of a toolkit for "dismantling racism in mathematics." The event website identifies the event as a partnership between California's San Mateo County Office of Education, The Education Trust-West and others.
Part of the toolkit includes a list of ways "white supremacy culture" allegedly "infiltrates math classrooms." Those include "the focus is on getting the 'right' answer," students being "required to 'show their work,'" and other alleged manifestations. The curriculum "helps educators learn key tools for engagement, develop strategies to improve equitable outcomes for Black, Latinx, and multilingual students.
"The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so," the document for the "Equitable Math" toolkit reads. "Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict."
The toolkit also encourages teachers to "center ethnomathematics," which includes a variety of guidelines. One of them instructs educators to "identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views."
The newsletter surfaced amid a broader uproar over critical race theory and diversity training sessions in government entities. For example, a media frenzy erupted last year after a controversial graphic on "whiteness" surfaced from National Museum for African American History and Culture.
The museum's graphic broke the "aspects and assumptions of whiteness" into categories such as "rugged individualism" and "history." For example, some of the "white" values identified in the chart include:
Rugged individualism
The nuclear family where the husband is the breadwinner and protector of the family
The "Protestant work ethic"
Christianity
Respect for authority
Scientific ‘thinking’: objective, rational
Work before play
Delayed gratification
Optimism “Tomorrow will be better”
Now we can add ‘math’ to the list of white oppressive values, along with its correct answers. Correct answers imply incorrect answers and we certainly can’t have that. I hope none of the students educated under this system ever become engineers, doctors, technicians, etc. where having the "right" answer is critical in the design of bridges, treatment of patients, design of airplanes and automobiles etc.
Cardiovascular Care is Racist
The American Heart Association — an organization that funds cardiovascular research — issued a call for action against structural racism in cardiovascular care.
“Structural racism is a major cause of poor health and premature death from heart disease and stroke,” explained a November 10 press statement. The association examined the “historical context, current state and potential solutions to address structural racism in the U.S., and outlines steps the association is taking to address and mitigate the root causes of health care disparities.”
The nonprofit is one of the latest professional associations and businesses to make a statement about racism in the United States, in the wake of a wave of social justice activism throughout 2020.
Climate Change is Racist
Apparently, global warming, climate change and other environmental apprehensions are racist. Who says? Well, the Sierra Club, BLM, numerous woke college professors, and leading environmental groups around the world. Remember, these leading environmental organizations also claim that the earth is too populated by about 93-96%. I notice that they never blame themselves for overpopulation, or offer to help reduce the ‘problem.’ In the Sierra Club’s own words,
Climate change is a symptom of the same unequal system. It is the denial of the right to exist on an enormous, planetary scale. It’s what happens when the lives of marginalised people and non-human species are viewed as expendable. That expendability, and the continuation of this system, is a choice. Nothing about it is inevitable or necessary, yet those in power choose to continue it every single day.
The answer to all of this obviously isn’t easy, but the approach must include anti-racism at its core [CRT and social justice]. Anti-racism, actively working to replace the current system with something that repairs past harms and redistributes power meaningfully in favour of people of colour is what is required of everyone in the climate emergency, especially those of us who benefit the most from how things are right now. We cannot fight climate change without being anti-racist.
Our Thoughts
For the last two decades this country has been on a long strange trip and the one and only thing that we know about it anymore is that it's racist. Everything is racist.
Racism has become an indisputable fact of the universe. Whatever else may be in doubt, racism isn't. It can't be. It's become the thing we discuss because everyone knows that it exists and everyone is racist (just ask your average social justice warrior posing as an Adventist millennial).
They’ll tell you America is racist. The woke ones will tell you the Church is racist. Just look at Segregation, the Trail of Tears and whatever happened last week that is already being analyzed on Salon, and trending on Twitter, spun on Facebook and then chewed and digested by the slower eaters of the surviving outposts of the print media. Everyone and everything is racist.
Except it’s not true.
What is true is that everyone has their history of being oppressed and discriminated against either in America or in their home country or in school. Not everyone is still conscious of these grievances and grudges. And that's a good thing and a bad thing. A little consciousness of their own history by the descendants of Jewish, Irish and Protestant immigrants would prevent them from grasping at senseless post-racial shibboleths like White Privilege.
Our search for racism has become an inner spiritual search for a new idol. When the biggest issue with racism is that not enough people are constantly thinking about it, then the real problem is that there isn't a problem. And that’s where we are at in our country and church, in spite of recent attempts to massage white guilt into the sacrament of a new woke communion.
That candidly sums up the state of American racism, which is a problem searching for a problem. But there is a real problem, which are American race relations being characterized by suspicion, irritation, guilt and occasional explosions carefully stirred up and set off by an entire field of professional provocateurs in academia and the media. That is the real problem.
America does not have a racism problem. The church does not have a racism problem. It has a problem obsessing about racism. The obsession isn't black or white, it comes out of the ranks of academics and activists who use it to disrupt these organizations while profiting from the havoc.
Grievances don't go away when you constantly demand an absolute justice that no human being is equipped to provide. They go away when you let go of the grievances and try to live together. It’s called forgiving those who trespass against us, that our trespasses might also be forgiven. This leads us away from temptation, and away from the idol of universal racism.
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“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (Matthew 6:9—13).