A Victory Garden for Democracy
Bring a trowel to this gunfight
Today is one of those days. A day when I feel soul-numbingly sad.
The grief worsens around holidays. I know it is that way with loss. You feel it most acutely when everyone else around you seems to be celebrating. When memories come flooding back — of days past, the before times.
In the United States, summer unofficially begins with Memorial Day, reaches its fullness around July 4, and slowly ebbs away until Labor Day closes the season. For whatever reason, summer’s colors almost always seem to be red, white, and blue — with parades festooned with flags and banners, picnics with blueberry pies to be served on tables covered with red gingham clothes. Unlike autumn with its blazing oranges and yellows, winter with its cool tones and merry red and green, and spring’s explosion of pastels, summer brings forth American patriotic displays in flags, food, fashion, and flowers everywhere.
It is the season of wheat waving on the prairies, corn high across farmlands, gardens full of bounty, trees laden with fruit. American abundance, national fecundity, when nature itself is a metaphor for democracy.
Our summer holidays reflect pride in all that — the sacrifices it has taken to bring forth a nation across a continent, and the uninhibited joy in its success.
This year, I am grieving America. People tell me to cheer up and fight for a better country (I do that, you know I do that), work for the America we can still be. Fight, fight, fight, they say.
Mostly I want to cry, cry, cry. The shadowy blue of my own soul contrasts sharply with the blue of our flag — “Old Glory Blue,” as it is called, the blue of vigilance and justice, the blue symbolizing union. I’m rarely blue at Christmas. But I frequently am when Memorial Day shows up on my calendar — and it is worse than ever this year.
*****
In the last month, I realized that I’m probably in the fourth stage of grief. Yes, people I know have died this past year and other friends have faced and are facing frightening illnesses. Such losses are hard. Yet, this is the natural progress of being human. As you enter into the later decades, things change and things end. People you treasure cross over into memory and a different kind of love.
As hard an adjustment as it is in one’s sixties to get used to all that, this other thing has added to the weight of it all — the accelerating collapse of American democracy, the death of all I thought I knew about my own country, and the rattling bones of what we used to call the American dream.
What’s the point? Why care? Why even try to stop the authoritarian onslaught?
So many of us are depressed. I’ve struggled with depression throughout my life — I know its signs. The irritability, disrupted sleep, inattentiveness, isolation, and worst of all, the emptiness. And then, there’s the fear of sharing it with anyone lest they rush you to therapy, proffer herbal cures, or recommend the great new antidepressant they’ve tried.
They mean well.
But what’s the therapy for authoritarianism? The pill?
Mostly I need to cry. Like I did in public at the end of a lecture recently in Canada. And when I cried, others did, too. I hadn’t realized that Canadians also needed to cry about losing America.
There’s solidarity in tears. In grief. Millions and millions of us are asking why — and we’re struggling with the ending of what we thought we knew.
It is all very sad.
*****
Grief happens in five stages. Or, at least that’s what the experts say. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Although Donald Trump didn’t cause America’s demise, he’s done nothing for the last decade but throw accelerant on a smoldering pyre. And he dances around the flames like a demon around a fire.
America was already like a drought-stricken California forest. Donald Trump just torched it.
Since the summer of 2024, as it became increasingly clear that he’d be returning to the White House, I started down the path of grief. Denial was its first step: This couldn’t be happening. I’d thought we could somehow stop it all, even after the election. I literally couldn’t believe we’d make the same mistake again. I refused to watch the Inauguration — as if ignoring it all would magically make it go away.
By spring 2025, I had entered the way of anger. Anger at him, the cabinet lackeys, cowardly politicians, the institutions and businesses capitulating to him, and, most of all, every single voter who had voted him back in. Anger was palpable — and productive! At least I had something, these feelings of rage, a connection with reality and, above all, truth. I yelled at the news. I yelled in my backyard. I yelled with friends. I yelled at God. I mostly vented safely in podcasts, in print, or (as gently as possible) in the pulpit. I learned (and I’m grateful for learning it!) that anger can strengthen you along the way.
In the autumn of last year, anger morphed into bargaining. I wanted to fix the all the problems. In effect, I was negotiating with the end of democracy — figuring out how we’d failed, how we could repair it, what could be given away in search of a diplomatic peace with the end of liberal democracy.
I’m an Episcopalian. We’ve got a joke in the Episcopal church — What’s the difference between a terrorist and a liturgist? (Pause) You can negotiate with a terrorist.
You can’t bargain with Donald Trump. Or with Stephen Miller or Pete Hegseth or Russell Vought or any of the leaders of this authoritarian takeover. Some people act as if they are political “terrorists” of a sort, elected ones to be sure. Holding the rest of us “hostage” for what they want. If you give them that something, however, they might be satisfied. Maybe diplomacy will work to contain their worst impulses.
In my personal bargaining stage, I realized that they weren’t and aren’t political actors — they are religious ones. They have no real political goal except power, and they pursue it with religious zeal. When do you have enough power? Well, never.
Bargain today and Trump and his allies will take more tomorrow.
They have a faith, an ideology of power, and they have rites and rituals that must be practiced and followed without question by everyone whether one believes it or not. You must perform it. Worshiping Donald Trump is part of the liturgy of American authoritarianism.
What’s the difference between a terrorist and liturgist? You can negotiate with a terrorist.
Trump authoritarianism is a religion.
And thus ended bargaining. Mostly. I still try bargaining occasionally, even though I now know diplomacy is hopeless.
*****
Next came the grief. Great, long, engulfing silences with no real tears and nothing to say. It started right around Easter this year. At least that’s when I first noticed it.
On Easter Sunday morning, when everyone was singing alleluia, I sat down in my pew with my face buried in my hands wishing it was still Holy Week when you can legit cry in church. I thought, “Sure, Jesus rose from the dead. I’m not so sure about America. We’re never coming back.”
I don’t know how long I’d been depressed. After all, the weeks before were Lent and you are supposed to feel bad. February maybe? January?
During the months of Lent and following season of Sad Easter, I found myself unexpectedly thinking about my mother. She was born in 1938 and was a small child during the World War II. Once, when I was a teenager, I asked her what she remembered of the war. “Not much,” she replied. “I was so little. The grown-ups seemed so preoccupied. But I do remember planting a Victory Garden in the backyard. The garden made me happy. I felt like I was helping.”
And so, in recent weeks, I did likewise. I planted some plants. Then more. And then I started obsessively buying pots of flowers, herbs, and vegetables at the farmers’ market and the local nursery.
Before I knew it, I was planting a Victory for Democracy Garden in my backyard. In honor of my mother. In honor of some crazy notions I still hold about justice, truth, democracy, and love of neighbor.
I even planted a pot of red, white, and blue flowers for Memorial Day. Memorializing what America maybe was, at least sort of, once. And what she still might be.
On nice mornings, I sit on the rocker amid the flower beds and pots. There, I pray and sob and sit in silence. I sip a cup of tea. I scribble random thoughts and fears in my journal. Grief demands its space.
But here’s the thing. After the early ritual of quiet mourning, I get up and tend to the flowers. I check them. Every single day. I water the ground. I fertilize them. I look for signs of unwanted pests or disease. I ensure that squirrels haven’t dug at the roots. I watch them grow toward the direction of the afternoon sun. I’m eagerly waiting the first buds and the first fruits.
I’m still sad. But, oddly enough, I’ve accepted that my new normal might just be planting a garden for democracy. Like my mother. Like the millions of other Americans who, in the midst of World War II, didn’t really know if they were growing veggies for an invading army of Nazis. They planted in hope. And maybe they even stopped crying while doing it.
Or maybe their tears watered the soil of those new gardens. Those antifascist backyard plots. And there, a new America began to bloom — the one I grew up in and now mourn.
Conventional wisdom says not to bring a knife to a gunfight. But a trowel? Why not? After all, the ancient prophet promised that swords will become plowshares.
I may be slightly hapless as a gardener, but I sense I’m not entirely without hope. My faith teaches me that.
Even on the sad days.
Some say that there’s a sixth stage — meaning. “Meaning” comes last along this long, winding way.
Meanwhile, you can find me in the garden. Especially on national holidays.
INSPIRATION
This planet will not
be healed
by powerful politicians
in big cities
who spend trillions
on a global strategy
that never quite begins.
They also burn
much fuel.
Earth will be healed
by villagers
who sing,
by backyard gardeners
like you,
who walk more slowly
right here,
who feel the green
through bare soles,
speaking fewer words,
cradling
each others anger
like mothers,
awakening
the heirloom seeds
of the heart.
— Alfred K. LaMotte
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I thank you with all the gratitude I can summon.
Gardens move at their own pace, and they don't always do exactly what you expect them to do when you expect them to do it.
That's a really nice lesson to have, right there in front of me, as a person who's thinking in a political way. Politics are slow and often don’t move in the directions that I might expect. So to see that good things can come out of those surprises can be really useful. It's a space where I can recharge and learn about the way change works.
— Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
You speak for so many of us, Diana...I am 80 years old and, along with a pandemic, an authoritarian in the White House is something I never expected to see.
I worry not so much for my generation but for my 4 children and 9 grandchildren. Along with unproductive worrying, I try to commit us all to God's love and care, trusting that new leaders, people of integrity, will be raised up. Perhaps they will find a new path for the country.
There are many types of gardens. The beauty of a flower or vegetable or orchard garden is palpable with fingers, bare feet, -eyes and noses. The garden you have planted with me and so many, my dear, is one of ideas and emotions. I’m not sure that literal gardens can change the world - even if they symbolize hope. But the garden you are planting with this blog is one that will.
“Morning has broken…where his feet pass.”