National emergency a time to cultivate our gardens

At the behest of Presidents Wilson and FDR, previous generations grew home vegetable Victory Gardens to support our troops’ battlefield victories, offsetting food shortages and freeing factories for our war efforts. In 1943, Eleanor Roosevelt planted a Victory Garden on the White House grounds. In 2009, Michelle Obama followed in her footsteps. My grandmother, Claribel Van Alstyne, began Victory Gardening during the Great Depression, then continued planting and harvesting for half a century. I grew up picking vegetables in the lush expanse of her immense garden in Cornwall Bridge, Conn.

In recent years, our nation has been rent by childish rejections of science, math, vaccination and competence, propagandized with political assertions of “alternative facts.” It’s time to grow up. We have no more time for such foolishness. We face a common foe. Both the epidemiology of past pandemics and emerging science of SARS-CoV-2 indicate that this pandemic may propel a series of killing waves, circling the planet for several years until vaccination is universally available.

Our nations’ economies are more connected than ever before in human history, and are, predictably, nosediving into a major global depression that economists predict will last well over a year. COVID-19 is just one domino in a predictable cascade of underlying economic fault lines economists have observed for many months, including the increased distress ratio, increased corporate junk debt, inverted yield curve, increased wealth inequality and food insecurity, the Trump tariff wars, and, more recently, the Russian-Saudi oil war.

Unemployment is skyrocketing around the world. Denying science by closing our eyes to facts, like the three little monkeys, will not change the outcome. It will only increase the severity of human suffering. “The truth will out.” Magical thinking will not change it. The exponential growth of COVID-19 cases and unemployment filings are irrefutable.

It is time to turn swords into plowshares. Isaiah 2:4. Guns do not create toilet paper, bread or jobs. So dust off your trowel or hoe. Pick up a kitchen spoon. Plant a Victory Garden. Seeds are cheap. Dirt is cheap, whether in a back yard, an empty city lot, a window box or a windowsill pot. Growing food, any kind, any amount, connects you the restorative and creative power of nature, lowers your blood pressure, fills your lungs with fresh air and showers your face with sunshine, boosting your Vitamin D, your immune system and your mood.

Gardening gives you a gym-free workout, saves grocery money, teaches your kids biology, and can be done while “socially distancing.” Every plant is a tiny little carbon sink that combats climate change by lowering CO2. As for the produce: Eat it, can it, freeze it, lacto-ferment it, share it, trade it. The phytonutrients in vegetables support your immune system. Vegetables make you stronger. Eating more vegetables makes our planet healthier. Victory Gardening has no downside. Every human will need food to survive this storm, and that need will grow as the dual viral and economic crises predictably impact food production and distribution.

“To every thing there is a season.” Ecc. 3:2. This is our season for science, for planting, for unified self-sacrifice. This is our season to sew and sterilize masks, donate blood, and check in with neighbors to dispel the fear, stress and despair that lead, all too often, to domestic violence and suicide. Let our collective mettle in this fight against our common foe build a new Greatest Generation. We have no time to waste. It is time for all of us to “cultivate our garden[s].” Together, as FDR said in 1944, “We shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy.” And when we, collectively, beat the COVID-19 curve, we can share our homegrown bounty, celebrating victory by bowing our heads in global Thanksgiving.