Yes, You Can Throw a Forest: Defeating evil before it can grow

Of course, if I said to you, “pick up those trees in that forest and throw them off into the distance,” you would think it impossible.  Yet I might still insist that you could do it.  And that the success of that venture isn’t in whether it was possible or not but that it was all a matter of timing.  If you wait until the trees are deeply rooted and fully grown, it is a much more challenging task than if you were to try to throw the various trees if they had not yet been planted in the ground, and were still contained within a bag of seeds.  Even a child could throw the trees then, by throwing them while they are still seeds.  A seed is still a tree before it has had the opportunity to grow into something much more substantial.  If we were to plant the entire bag of seeds into the ground and let them grow into a whole forest, things would have changed a lot, making it much more difficult to throw a forest.  But you still could; you’d have to change the state of the matter.  A fully grown forest then takes a lot of work to remove, lots of power tools, and a means of chopping up the trees into something much smaller so we could deal with them.  Like a chipper shredder and a chainsaw.  The impossibility of the task is only in the state of growth.  If you try to throw a seed, you can do it easily.  If you try to throw a fully grown tree, it would be impossible without the tools of humanity to change the condition and break it up into much smaller segments.  So, the outlandish nature is purely a judgment based on timing. 

There has been a lot of fear based on what people are seeing regarding the level of evil that has grown all around us, such as the recent TikTok story about Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” which has been weaponized to appeal to an entirely new generation of Americans and is a topic all its own.  Many of those kids weren’t even born yet, but they were targeted by the enemy with this Chinese-driven propaganda campaign essentially before they had a chance to grow up.  China, using the Art of War, which anybody can read, is planning the destruction of America and their rival in the global marketplace by essentially destroying the forest by crushing the seeds before they have a chance to grow.  And we could say that about most things we see around us, from drugs, education, finance, the concerns of the Chamber of Commerce, things start to make a lot more sense if you think of war in this strategy of destroying the enemy before roots from the seeds ever take hold.  Much of what has been coming at us, as Americans, by many enemies around the world is this strategy of destroying the country before its next generation matures.  If they wait too long, it would become a much more complicated task and require more technology and force, which those enemies may never be able to muster.  All these problems that we see now didn’t just happen, nor did they form overnight.  They were always intended to attack early and destroy often.  Not by attacking the strength of a nation, but their weakness, their youth.  And clearly, we can look around us and see the results.  Many people are complicit in letting it all happen because they got caught paying attention to everything but what they should have been thinking about.

But all is not lost because the same works the other way.  To defeat evil, destroy it while it grows or takes hold in a culture.  Attacking it while fully grown is much more complicated than pulling it up by the roots while it’s still growing from a seed.  If you have ever done any gardening, it is not good to let weeds grow around your corn, potatoes, and green beans.  You want to get in there and pull up all the weeds so they cannot contaminate your good crops.  Allowing the weeds to grow with everything else only makes a mess and takes away from the healthy growth of the plants you want.  When the enemies of our culture told us that we should not judge, what they meant was that we should not look at our gardens and our youth and say this beautiful corn and this weed are different.  They are both plants and growing, but we should not judge which is valuable.  Of course, that was just another form of this attack because, in the early stages, you can’t quickly tell a weed from a stalk of corn.  As they are growing from seeds, they look very much alike.  And for good reason.  They want to survive as a plant species, so not showing what they are early allows them to sneak under the radar of judgment to fulfill their purpose.  If it’s corn, then they will produce food.  If they are weeds, they will take away from the healthy growth of other plants.  But if we wait too long to make those judgments, the change will have happened, and removing them from our culture is much more complex, like throwing out the forest. 

Many of us are looking at a society of weeds, of drug addicts, lazy people, corrupt people, seeds that have grown into adults, or ideas that have established themselves as foundations of our current institutions that are perpetuating evil, and we feel there is nothing we can do about it.  But I would argue that there is a lot we can do.  Yet I would also say that the success of doing anything depends on the timing.  Do things, plant seeds, or destroy those seeds at their very foundations before they have a chance to grow.  I have seen the freedom movement doing this for many decades in reaction to the evil intentions of America’s enemies.  The casual observers don’t notice much because they are too busy looking at the fully grown forests without considering the plants that make it up, the combination of trees, weeds, shrubbery, and various types of grass.  If such a forest were to be removed, it would be easy when all those plants were just thrown into a bag together as seeds and dealt with accordingly.  But now that they are grown, the sheer magnitude of their physical presence eliminates such thoughts from consideration, and they don’t make the connection.  But we can do to them what they have done to us; we can destroy their dumb ideas while they are still seeds in a bag.  We can rot them from the inside out. We can cut them from being nurtured so they cannot grow into a monstrosity of evil that saturates our senses with villainy and ill intent.  Yes, we can throw a forest.  The key is to do it early and often.  And to judge the good from the bad, the living and the dead.  And not to feed evil as we might provide the plants we want in society.  Life will do what life does; it will grow into something.  What it ends up being and how a forest looks in its final form has much to do with our judgments of their behavior while they are still seeds.  If we address those concerns early enough, we will have much greater success than waiting until everything is fully grown and a much more complex matter.

Rich Hoffman