In a perfect world

My brother planted a beautiful blue spruce in his yard way back in the seventies.  Like me he loved the symmetry, the color, the smell of it and in his mind’s eye he saw it growing there in the corner of his front yard, a piece of living art that would give him pleasure for years to come.

And it did.  Then one day he realized its branches were starting to impinge upon his driveway and the electrical wires at the front of his lot and its shade was killing the carefully cultivated flowers in the gardens right next to his house.

He remembered that when he planted that tiny three-foot tree the instructions said blue spruces grow to be fifty to seventy-five feet tall with a ten to twenty foot spread.  Obviously the people who printed that information had no reason to lie.

The tree did what all living things do.  It grew up to be what it was and my brother learned a very difficult lesson.  He ended up having to have his precious tree removed.

Human beings often do things with the best of intentions without really thinking things through.  A chimpanzee who can do everything a five year old child does except speak can be taught to sign and dress in clothes and look very cute, but he will eventually grow up to be a full sized mature chimpanzee not a young man who goes to Harvard.  Most of us don’t really have a problem understanding these things, at least in retrospect.

We understand and are tolerant of all sorts of things in plants and animals.  It only makes sense.  Yet I’ve seen people try to force children into being things they were never meant to be. 

All people need to learn the skills it takes to live in their environment, but just as it is impossible to turn a bird into a fish, or a rose bush into a spruce tree, it is impossible to change a child’s real self into something it is not.

Human kind always looks to some outside source to validate their fears and prejudices because simple common sense and intelligence could never accept the heinous things they do in the name of what is right.

Every living organism has a purpose somewhere in nature and while we may have to control the weeds and poisonous things, most weeds were once considered flowers somewhere and some of the most unlikely plants have turned out to be a cure for something that plagues mankind.

It is possible to twist and bend and destroy all the beautiful possibilities that lie inside a child, but why would any loving person want to do that?  Embrace what is there and make room for it to grow into its full potential and who knows what miraculous things might happen in a perfect world.