Politically Correct Gardening?

Gardeners have always been a congenial bunch of folks. Something about getting out and collecting dirt under the fingernails coupled with the satisfaction of seeing things grow. Now according to the newspaper, gardeners have gotten a bit testy. Even dividing each other and themselves into several camps.

Sigh - does everything need to generate polarization?

It seems there are "traditionalists,' stereotyped  as middle-aged genteel ladies with nothing better to do than putter in their gardens and cultivate their roses. (Such loaded language. No I am not making this up. Go to the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Variety section, January 11th).

Then there are the aggressive  no-chemical veggie growers, generally younger, who preach about damage done to the planet by rose-growing ladies who don't have a cue. At that point, I had read enough. I put down the paper without finishing the article.

What have we come to?

Over the years, part of the enjoyment in gardening has been comparing notes with other gardeners with varying perspectives. Growing my mind as well as my garden. Experimenting and reading, especially during winter months when the garden lies dormant. Now, if the article is correct, militant gardeners are sorting themselves into various camps!

If it were only about gardens and gardening. We could sit back and have a laugh about people getting bent out of shape over each others gardening practices. Methinks it falls in the category of taking something too seriously.

But I wonder if the whole thing is part of a larger pattern, in which we make our differences into pietistic adamancies. I am right and you are WRONG. Gone is the creativity that arises out of diversity, something badly needed in our world today. I insist everyone share MY perspective.

When I was growing up, there was the Cold War. We could conveniently deposit all our animosities on the terrible Communists. Now folks from Russia read this blog. And the two of us have traveled to their country several times, a place no longer labeled as enemy. Perhaps therein is a partial explanation. The human tendency to categorize the good and the bad no longer has huge unknown  geographic expanses. We are globally connected in a complicated world.

So instead have we turned on each other? Tea Party and Occupy folks - who actually share some common concerns. Congress and State Legislatures functioning like two bull elk during rutting season, who sometimes cannot disengage and starve to death locked together?

Politically correct anything? Who ever coined that phrase? Shades of McCarthyism that we think we have moved beyond its damage to people who thought dfifferently.The important gardening question is not over a refusal to use chemicals on a garden or loving roses. The question is: why would any gardener want to demonize anyone else who loves to dig in the dirt and watch things grow.

Hrrumph!