The Great Pruning

Donald Trump’s election and the announcement of his choices for cabinet positions have triggered our friends on the left who gnash their teeth and bemoan what has befallen them.  Some, like the ever-foolish Senator Lisa Murkowski, vow to vote against Trump’s cabinet choices in their confirmation hearing.  Some leftists have taken things one step further, making outlandish promises to leave the country, and have deleted all their social media accounts in spite.  It is time for rational people to think about what Donald Trump’s cabinet choices indicate but in a different context than what the liberal snowflakes are telling us.

Trump proposes to place people in his cabinet who are committed to reducing the size and scope of the federal government.  This action reminds me of my grandmother's raspberry patch when I was a kid.  My grandmother was an excellent gardener and had a section of her garden set aside to grow raspberries.  As kids, we loved going out in the summer and picking a handful of fresh berries for a snack. 

However, that wasn’t the biggest benefit we received from her garden.  The prolific abundance of berries it produced allowed her to make her special raspberry jam every summer.  Everyone in the family loved it, and we looked forward to late summer when she would be harvesting berries and canning the jam, sharing jars of it with everyone in the family to enjoy all winter long.  I honestly don’t remember ever eating store-bought jam in my childhood because of grandma’s skill at jam-making and her prolific garden.

That all seemed to change one day.  One spring she organized all of us grandkids into a work party and informed us it was time to prune the raspberries.  Experienced gardeners know that raspberries can spread quickly and take over your garden if you are not careful, and besides that, an out-of-control raspberry patch doesn’t produce as much fruit.  My grandmother knew these facts and what to do about it, but to us kids, pruning back the raspberry patch was heresy!  We were worried we would never have jam again if we cut down all the plants!  I remember arguing with my grandmother forcefully to prevent the “great pruning.”  Surely, there must be some other way, I pleaded, but she was adamant about what she was going to do.

Finally, all her little grandkid helpers were rounded up, me included.  55 years later, I still remember the day.  It was quite a chore and took a long time, but the plants were cut back, the walking paths between them restored, and the old dead canes and underbrush removed. We kids thought grandma had lost her mind, but the truth is, it turned out that she was right.

Although the volume of green foliage in her raspberry patch was reduced, it was now possible to walk through the garden easily.  Before the great pruning, we could only pick the berries around the perimeter.  Afterwards, we could access every plant.  Also, the reduction in foliage made it easier to see the berries, and because of the additional sunlight, each plant seemed to produce more berries than before.

Her garden ended up being more productive after we pruned the plants than it was previously.

My grandmother’s raspberry patch is a metaphor for what Donald Trump proposes. He believes that our government has grown too big and is bloated, making it less efficient than it should be. Because of its size and inefficiency, it can’t provide the services it should to the people. Trump is planning to prune it back to make it more productive.

So, when you hear members of the Deep State like Alaska’s Senator Lisa Murkowski moan and whine about Trump’s cabinet picks and how they won’t be good for the country, what she means is that these picks will reduce the size and scope of the government bureaucracy back in Washington DC.  The members of that bureaucracy contribute money to Lisa’s political campaigns. When you hear about “Dark Money” in politics, like the outside dark money that was opposed to the recent repeal of ranked-choice voting, much of it comes from people in Washington, DC. They support candidates like Murkowski and try to secretly influence elections in places like Alaska to further their agenda. If the truth is known, voters in Washington, DC, are probably who Lisa Murkowski really represents.  It isn’t the residents here in Alaska. It is the entrenched members of the government’s administrative state.

So now, when I watch TV and hear the Lefty elites complain, I am reminded of way back when a bunch of ignorant kids surrounded their grandmother, begging her not to prune the raspberries.  My grandmother knew she was right back in the day, and Trump knows he is right now.  Today’s naysayers are the ignorant children dancing around who don’t understand the situation, and yes, Lisa, I’m talking specifically about you.