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The strangler fig, like our parasitic plutocracy, sometimes chokes its unwilling "host tree" to death.

Parasites, liars & thieves

When I was a child, my family lived in two different Florida cities, 10 years apart. Besides endless stands of spruce pines and seaweed-strewn Gulf Coast beaches, North Florida featured deep sinkholes that opened up without warning in the soil's limestone substrate, sometimes engulfing cars and even houses. In Gainesville at age 5, I clambered down the walls of an ancient sinkhole known as The Devil's Millhopper, clinging to pine seedlings for dear life and flinching in absolute terror of imagined water moccasins slithering down streams of rainwater. At 15, I floated on my back in ice-cold Wakulla Springs outside Tallahassee, praying that a gator from the far bank didn't slink towards me underwater across that frightful, 186-foot-deep chasm.

In the cypress swamps of Florida lives a plant whose deadly power filled me with dread at the simple realization that it was "out there." I had seen The Seeds From Space and Day of the Triffids when I was far too young and suggestible for horror movies. I actually developed a childhood phobia about plants with long "tentacles" like those of squids, growing through the windows into my bedroom while I slept at night. (A psychiatrist later told me this was either penis envy or a rape fantasy. The psychiatrist, I must add, was a man who fancied himself a latter-day Sigmund Freud.)  

Ficus aurea, the Florida strangler fig, is a tropical vine with a growth habit adapted for dark forests where the competition for sunlight is fierce. Its seeds, dispersed by birds, germinate in crevices atop random trees deep in the forest canopy, then send out aerial roots and gradually encase an unwilling "host" tree, eventually strangling its victim to death and leaving a hollowed core behind, entwined by spiraling vines.

I no longer fear plants; in fact, I became a gardener once I grew up. I envision the strangler fig now as akin to the parasitic plutocracy that entangles 99 percent of our culture, leeching the sap and sustenance out of our economy and our ecosystem alike, until the earth is wasted and the rich and powerful thrive amid the ruins for a few more decades.

This blog is dedicated to fighting for the futures of our children and grandchildren — by speaking out in protest as so many others are doing, by slashing back the strangler fig's grasping tendrils before they grow as thick and invasive as a plague of Burmese pythons in the Everglades, crushing the very life out of us.

What happens to the "invincible" strangler fig after its victim has been fully plundered remains to be seen. Will the plutocrats shrivel and die, too, after they have despoiled the planet, used up its resources, and eradicated everyone and everything they view as "beneath" them — or other than they are? What will they be left without?

• No more fossil fuels to burn
• No more tillable soil to grow crops on
• No more endangered species to exterminate
• No more port cities remaining above sea level
• No more clean water to drink
• Nowhere to live free of chemical pollution and radiation
• No more national parks or wilderness
• No more rainforests to filter the air
• No more fresh air to breathe
• No more cheap labor to exploit
• No more "cannon fodder" to sacrifice to war
• No more unwanted immigrants to exile
• No more "undesirable" racial and ethnic groups to scapegoat
• No more willfully ignorant fools to brainwash
• No more consumers to cheat and swindle
• No more customers to buy whatever they're selling
• Nothing of value from which to extract "profits"
• No more voters to entice and deceive
• No one left to oppress and marginalize
• No reason or means to go on living

No matter how much wealth they amass, it won't buy them immortality and they can't take it with them (even though the pharaohs tried). In the end, like Ozymandias, they'll die the same as the rest of us — and if their religion really does have all the answers, they're in for a cataclysmic shock when they discover that the passage from the Old Testament about camels and needle's eyes was the part of believing every word of the Bible that they were supposed to focus the most attention on.