Dying Gardens

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Some of you read my first garden parable. Big tomato plants. A city council. A row of dead vines. The council starved the best plants, the buyers left, and then they held a ribbon-cutting because the gap between the best plant and the worst plant was finally zero.

Everything was equal. Everything was also dead. A proud day for equity.

When I wrote that one, I cut them some slack. I figured the council just had a few tomatoes short of a salad. I honestly believed they thought that if you drained enough water from the strong plants, the weak ones would catch up on their own.

I was wrong. I do not enjoy typing that sentence.

I have now watched the same experiment in New York, California, Illinois, New Jersey, Chicago, and Detroit. In my classroom, if a student runs the same lab six times, gets the same disaster six times, and asks to run it a seventh time the same way, I have two options. Either the kid is not the brightest bulb on the porch, or the disaster is the result he was after.

I am starting to lean toward option two.

WHAT IF THEY WANTED THE PLANTS DEAD?

Go back to that council meeting. Cut fertilizer to the big plants. Split the water “fairly.” Pick the best fruit early and hand it out. Then the leaves yellowed, the roots pulled in, and one morning the main vine was brown.

The question I never asked last time: what if the council knew?

Those big plants were never just producers. They shaded the little ones. They loosened the soil. They pulled in the customers who bought peppers and zucchini on the way out. Kill the big plants and you kill the whole bed. Then you blame the tomatoes for being greedy enough to die.

A lot of them did not die, though. They pulled up their own roots and walked out.

THE GREAT TOMATO MIGRATION

From 2020 to 2023, New York lost well over 300,000 residents, and the high earners were first in line for the exit. Citadel packed up for Miami. Goldman Sachs moved a big piece of its operation. California waved goodbye to Tesla, Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Charles Schwab. Every one of them landed in Texas.

Florida, with no state income tax, added hundreds of thousands of people in that same window and kept collecting more revenue than projected. Not from raising rates. From having more people who produce.

It is almost as if the fruit goes where the sunlight is.

What is next? A Democrat governor standing at a podium telling successful people they are not welcome in his state? … Oh wait. Andrew Cuomo already did that in 2018. My apologies. I cannot keep up with the parody anymore. They keep writing it for me.

THE VINE THAT CAME ALONG FOR THE RIDE

Here is where the biology teacher in me gets uneasy.

It was not the pruning shears that held those plants back in the old garden. It was the sun. Brutal heat that burned the vines every summer and forced the plant to put its energy into fruit instead of sprawl.

In the new garden the sun is gentler. The vines do not get scorched.

So they do not make more fruit. The fruit is still there. It is still good. It still feeds the neighbors. But the vine goes everywhere.

The vine is the policy. The vine is the regulation. The vine is the habit of showing up and voting for the same watering schedule that burned the last garden down.

I cannot make this up. You flee the fire, move in next door, and start handing out matches.

The fruit feeds the garden. The vine steals the light. And the vine does not need a supermajority. It only needs to show up to every meeting while the native plants are at work.

That is the invasive species. Not the tomato. The vine.

THE WEEDS

Meanwhile, back in the original garden, the shade is gone.

Those big plants used to choke out the undergrowth. They took the light, the water, and the nutrients. The weeds never got a foothold.

Now the weeds have the whole sky, and a council with nothing left to harvest has started watering them full time.

Weeds do not make tomatoes. They make green. Acres of it. The kind of green you put on a brochure. You cannot hold up a tomato at a press conference and say, “Look, we fixed inequality.” You CAN hold up a photo of uniform green and say everybody is equal now.

Equally hungry. But equal.

The council does not want fruit. The council wants canopy. They want that green in their own garden and in gardens two counties over. Green is what you count. Green is what you photograph. Green is what votes and never leaves.

Now, before somebody in the comments pretends I said something I did not: the weeds are the policy, not the people. I teach in a high-need district. I have watched kids with real talent get told since kindergarten that the system is rigged against them, that success is for other people, and that the only road to dignity runs through a government office. When the jobs left their town, nobody handed their parents a ladder. Somebody handed them a form.

That breaks my heart, and it should break yours. Those kids could be tomatoes. The council would rather they stay green.

Because a dependent voter is a loyal voter. A voter with a paycheck, a mortgage, and a small business starts asking rude questions like “where did my tax money go?” The council cannot have that.

WHERE THE BORDER COMES IN

This is also why the left cannot get enough of an open border, and compassion has nothing to do with it.

Some of those people will look like native plants. A few will work. A few will produce fruit. A few will put down roots and become part of the garden.

Most will not. Most are not native, do not behave like native, and will not produce fruit. They will produce green. And green is what keeps the council in power.

Illegal immigrants cannot legally vote in federal elections. But every single one of them is counted in the census, and the census decides how many House seats and electoral votes a state gets. More bodies, more seats. The council gets the power without needing a single ballot. Clever, if you are into that sort of thing.

And while they wait, plenty of those workers disappear into the shadow economy, paid in cash by employers who can hold a phone call to ICE over their heads. The same crowd demanding a $20 “living wage” for you has no problem with an exploited labor class, as long as the lettuce stays cheap.

“Who will pick the crops?” I have heard that question before in American history. Back then it was “who will pick the cotton?” Same party. Same question. Different decade.

WHO PAYS THE BILL

When the big plants leave, the council does not miss a meal. Salaries, pensions, and speaking fees all show up on time.

The ones who get hurt are the accountant, the IT guy, the janitor, the deli across the street, the dry cleaner, and the kid parking cars for tips. Every high earner who leaves takes a small economy of working-class jobs with him, and those jobs do not come back.

Then, every two years, the people left behind get told the rich people who LEFT are the reason they are broke, and the solution is more of the policy that made them leave. And people who have been lied to that long believe it, because what else have they been given?

Detroit was once one of the richest cities per capita in the country. It did not die overnight. It took decades of the same watering schedule. The last plant out turned off the lights, and the council blamed the plant.

IT WAS NEVER A DISEASE

In part one, I called this an autoimmune disorder — a body attacking its own healthy tissue. That was the kind diagnosis. The immune system was just confused.

I no longer buy it. A disorder is a tragedy. A purge is a plan.

The Democrat Party has leaned on an underclass for its entire history. In the antebellum South, it was literal slaves. Under Jim Crow, it was Black Americans legally shut out of opportunity. Today it is anyone they can keep dependent. You do not need chains when you have an EBT card. You do not need an overseer when a caseworker cuts your benefits the minute you earn a raise. Same control. Nicer press release.

A handout with no ladder is not compassion. It is a leash.

The Democrat Party never gave up slavery. They rebranded it.

Jim Quinn’s First Law of Liberalism says liberalism always produces the exact opposite of its stated intent. After watching this long enough, I would add one footnote: the opposite is the whole point.

They promised to shrink inequality, so they chased off the top. They promised to help the poor, so they made sure the poor would always need them. They promised to protect workers, so they shipped out the jobs and mailed out the checks.

THE WHOLE PARABLE, IN ONE BREATH

Starve your best plants. Watch them move somewhere sunny and bring the vine along. Water the weeds. Photograph the green. Then stand in an empty garden and wonder why there is nothing to eat.

Part one was a warning. This one is a charge sheet.

They are not confused. They never were. Most people are just still reading part one.

If you are young and watching your home state bleed its best employers, pay attention to who keeps holding the watering can.

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COMMENT below. Is your state a garden people are fleeing, or one they are moving to? And did they bring the vine?"