Meet, Eat, and Retreat

That was a little joke that the Birchers used to say about themselves and, like most good jokes, it had a certain amount of truth in it.  Contrary to the popular belief at the time, the Birchers were mostly just a social group that preached to the choir.  They were not a political party or a lobbying group, their declared purpose was to educate people and, like most educators, the only people who paid much attention to them were other educators.  I got interested in them when they advertised a public meeting to explain their case.  Some of our locals had invited them, and they came.  Shortly after I joined, the locals started drifting away and, before long, my wife and I were the only members left in town.  We then joined the "home chapter", which meant we sent them money, they sent us literature, and we didn't have to go to meetings anymore.  After a year or so, the literature started repeating itself, which led us to believe that we had learned all we could from those guys, and we stopped sending them money.  I was interested in the Birchers because they were against Communism and so was I.  Their assertion that our own government was in cahoots with the Commies was consistent with what I had seen in Berlin and in the news over the years.  What else was I supposed top think when our government said that they were our enemies and yet periodically held friendly meetings with them and bailed them out every time they had a bad wheat harvest?

I knew that Red China has been trying to take over the world by financial rather than military means for some time, and that they were doing it with money that we have given them over the years.  When Nixon started kissing up to the Red Chinese back in the 70s, I said at the time that no good would come of it, and I was right.  And you wonder how I got the idea that they were all in it together?

I knew that about the worms, which is why I found it hard to believe that they were bad for the soil.  They can't be both good and bad at the same time now can they.  When my buddy and I used to pick worms for fish bait back in Chicago, we soon learned that we would find more of them on lawns that hadn't been treated with chemical fertilizer or weed killer.  It makes sense that modern agricultural practices would be detrimental to worms, but I don't think they will go extinct any time soon.  There's lots of land in this country that is not under cultivation and, like the article says, some famers are already doing stuff to encourage the worms on their property.