Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church--Unitarian Universalist

“Gates and Walls”

Rev. David Takahashi Morris

February 17, 2008 

Once upon a time, in the center of the North American continent and in the piedmont regions of the Southeast between the mountains and the coastal forests, tall grass stretched as far as the eye could see in prairies and savannahs.  It sustained itself without any help from humans for century after century, green in the spring and the fall, and golden in the heat of summer.  Birds, insects, and animals found food and shelter in its long tangled stems and leaves.  Wildflowers and small shrubs mingled freely with it, and aggressive weeds competed for moisture and light and the nutrients of the soil under the dense layer of intertwined stems and roots, but the grass was sturdy and tough.  It held its own.   

Some people love grass so much they want their homes to be surrounded by it, not a tall tangled meadow but a low green carpet to play and rest and walk on.  For centuries they’ve been perfecting grass that will grow that way to make lawns. 

But something odd happens when people start choosing which kind of grass we want, and trying to make it grow where we want it to.  It’s hard work.  Grass in lawns doesn’t produce enough nutrients to feed itself the way the other plants and the animals living in it did on the prairies, and in the heat of summer without the shade and moisture of other plants it doesn’t go dormant and turn yellow, it dies. So it has to be fed with lime and fertilizer, and it has to be watered.  No matter how well it grows, though, we can’t keep other plants like dandelions and clover and duckweed from popping up.  We dig the weeds up, but they always came back.  Grubs and bugs attack the grass, and a whole lawn can turn into a brown mess in a couple of weeks.  The grass in lawns needs a lot of help.  People fought against pests and weeds by hand for a few hundred years, and then they invented chemicals that will kill them and started to pour those on.     

The odd thing is, the more we shelter grass from everything that competes with it and attacks it, the weaker it seems to become.  It isn’t hardy enough to hold its own any more, the way it was when it was just one plant among a lot of others competing for soil and water and light and air.  Being surrounded by difference made it stronger. 

Of course, all those chemicals and all that fertilizer and water have consequences, too.  They contribute to droughts, they pollute streams and rivers, and they poison the birds that live on the bugs that used to live in the grass without hurting it much, back when it was wild and tough. 

Agricultural and biological scientists explain that a lawn is a “monoculture,” an ecosystem that only has one species, and that monocultures are inherently unstable and fragile.   I’ve been talking about grass because it’s a convenient example; there are others that have been much bigger problems.  In the 1800s farmers all over Ireland stopped growing oats and barley and rye and about ten different kinds of potatoes, in favor of one variety of potato that was especially nutritious and easy to grow in a cold climate.   All it took was one fungus with a special taste for that potato, and millions of people faced starvation.  In Brazil, the biggest producer of oranges in the world right now, there’s a new tree disease called “citrus sudden death.” It only affects one kind of orange tree.  Unfortunately, nearly 85% of Brazil’s 250 million orange trees are that kind, because it grows big fruit fast.  Monocultures are inherently unstable and fragile. 

People who love beautiful lawns aren’t trying to create fragile monocultures; they’re not trying to worsen drought levels or to harm wildlife with chemical runoff. They’re just trying to make things better, just trying to protect their investment, just trying to keep their beautiful lawns safe.  Farmers who turn everything over to one crop and then support it with heavy irrigation and chemicals are just trying to make the best use of their land to make their businesses and their families more secure. 

When we care about something, we want to keep it safe, to protect it from real or imagined harm.  It’s a natural impulse; it’s true with people we care about and communities that are important to us—it’s true with almost anything we value.  But the desire to shelter, to keep things safe, can have unintended consequences, actually making them weaker.  We can end up creating monocultures, fragile and unstable.  Being surrounded by difference makes human beings stronger, and human communities as well. 

We want to raise our children to be peaceful, graceful, kind, and honest.  We want them to see other people as welcome companions on the human journey.  That’s what we teach in our religious education classes and at our family dinner tables.   

But we want to protect our children, too, and when we look at the public schools, we can get worried.  We don’t want our kids ever to be at risk of physical danger, and we don’t want them to be surrounded by kids who use drugs, who lie, cheat and steal, who aren’t disciplined.  If we get our news from reports on TV and in newspapers, that’s what we might hear about public schools.  It’s easy to think that a more controlled environment will keep them safe from all these things—like a good private school, or homeschooling.   

There can be good reasons for both of those options, but if our major reason is sheltering our children, we may be failing to give them tools and resources they need.  As they grow up, they will inevitably come into contact with the rough and tumble world we live in, full of the discomforts and risks we’ve been sheltering them from.  Will they be hardy enough to hold their own?   

Most of us want to live in neighborhoods with a sense of community, where people know and support each other, and enjoy each others’ company.  Yet we want to protect our homes and property values, too; we don’t want to have conflict with our neighbors, or to be surrounded by unfamiliar things or activities that aren’t in keeping with our values.  It’s tempting to think that if we withdraw into small intentional communities, or behind the gates of walled-off neighborhoods, that our homes and our family life will be sheltered from unpleasant influences or dangerous people. 

The sociologist James Loewen has written about “sundown towns,” places all across the country in the twentieth century that used overt laws or quiet intimidation to keep themselves all white.  We have banned such things by law, but we have not eradicated them. In fact, we have unintentionally reinvented them, in the form of nearly all-white neighborhoods.  The gates of a gated community are not explicitly intended to keep out black, Asian, or Latino/Latina and Hispanic people—but all too often that’s exactly how they function in reality. The covenants that create neighborhoods where all homeowners are required to follow particular aesthetic or behavioral standards are not explicitly intended to keep out people of different races or socioeconomic groups—but all too often that’s exactly what they do.  With all good intentions, we have created monocultures.  And monocultures of all kind are inherently fragile and unstable. 

Like the people who have perfected the beautiful green lawn with all its costs, we have never intended to create separate enclaves for ourselves and our children, where we won’t encounter the differences that make our human family so rich and wonderful.  But we need to challenge ourselves—we who believe in an undivided human family.  We need to ask if the safety we are trying to achieve is keeping us from the goal we hope for, and what risks we are willing to take to reach that goal.  If we want an undivided human family, we will have to look for the unintended barriers that keep difference out of our lives, and take them down. 

There is no safety in creating sheltered enclaves.  Like the grasses on the prairies, differences make us stronger.  May we seek them out and welcome them into our lives.