I plant pumpkins in my front yard every year.  To me they are the perfect post-tulip ground cover.  Most years we get at least 4 pumpkins, which means that we don't usually need to buy them from the store.  This year will be different.

About a month ago I was watering the pumpkins when I noticed this strange looking bug coming out from under the leaves.  When I watered at the root, there were dozens coming out to avoid the water. The plant was vibrant and blooming, so I wasn't super worried, but it did seem odd that all these bugs were all the sudden poking around my pumpkin plants.  

One week later, this pumpkin plant was completely dead.  Not just dead, but dry enough to be kindling.  As I watered the other three plants, I noticed the same bugs coming out.  They started at the one plant, and when that was dead, they moved to the next and finally they came to the biggest and healthiest plant.  This one had a softball size pumpkin growing.  I watched as the same thing happen to this plant as to the others.  Within a week, this last, healthiest pumpkin plant was dead.  The food for this bug had been killed and with it, the life of these bugs will be even shorter as they have poisoned the very thing that would keep them alive: their source of food.  They got fat off the excess while their children will have nothing left and starve.  The bug is called a "squash bug."  They eat all kinds of gourds, including pumpkins.  They also poison the plants with a chemical they secrete.

This got me thinking about us.  You may be wondering what this all has to do with a political blog, but here it is: we are killing ourselves.  We have ignored the warnings of those who saw this climate change coming.  We did not heed them like we did the ozone warnings in the 1970's; global warming coming directly afterward.  We are poisoning our planet.  We are poisoning our source of food; our very existence.  We don't have another pumpkin patch to conveniently go to that's the in the neighbors yard.  We're stuck here.

Watching the Amazon burn is a huge wake-up call.  It's a rain forest.  Rain forests don't burn like this.  Well, I guess now they do.  Republicans and conservatives have long denied even the reality of climate change.  Now that the glaciers are melting, the seas are rising, and the rain forests are burning, some are starting to see, but not enough.  Hundred-year storms are happening every five to ten years.  Weather is becoming even less predictable than it was.  Jet streams are not following the paths they have for millennia.  We can now grow grapes in England.  

Maybe that's why the Lord commanded us to be wise stewards.  He created the Earth for us; He expects us to take care of it.  Republicans have shirked that duty.  Even my fellow Latter-day Saint Republicans do not seem to see how we are defying the Lord and destroying His creation.  

I looked at the squash bugs standing on top of the leaves they had just killed, looking proud.  The pumpkin beside them totally destroyed.  It would give them food for maybe another couple weeks.  Then comes starvation. 

Are our children ready?