In a diplomatic gesture, the city of Tokyo gifted the United States 2,000 cherry blossom trees, with the push being sparked by a well-traveled woman and diplomat, Eliza Scidmore, after an 1885 trip to Japan. Scidmore would spend the next 24 years working on bringing the cherry trees she saw in Japan to the U.S., writing First Lady Helen H. Taft in 1909 about her efforts. Between Lady Taft’s fondness for the idea and the diplomatic finesse of Scidmore, the Japanese Consul of New York and the Japanese chemist Jokichi Takamine who coordinated the donation of trees from the Mayor of Tokyo, Washington, D.C. got its cherry trees in 1912.
All of this can be found on the National Park Service (NPS) website; however, what cannot be found is the current dilemma we face with our beautiful cherry trees. In traditional Trumpian fashion, President Donald Trump has posted on various social media platforms about renovating the East Potomac Golf Links in East Potomac Park, suggesting the trees on the edge of the golf links would be removed. Scheduled landscape work by RTEC Treecare at the end of August had stirred backlash over false claims of tree removal.
This prompts a larger concern and trend that can be seen in this second Trump regime: Our loss of credibility and standing in the global community. Sure, the cherry trees are far more symbolic than anything else, but they are important nonetheless. A symbol of diplomacy and friendship according to the NPS, removal of them would be a waning of that friendship with Japan. We see it in the foolish trade war with Canada, the renaming of Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico; middle school playground-type behavior from the supposed most powerful person in the world.
This affects us here at Keene State as well, leaving us in a more precarious position than before. The breakdown of these global political ties makes the world less willing to work with the U.S., which is incredibly dangerous as our entire economy is based on foreign governments buying our debt. We have based an entire social system off of exceeding wealth, requiring motor vehicles to travel and move goods, with no redundancies or failsafes factored in.
Maybe this is not just about the trees. Maybe this is watching an entire system based on duct tape and bubblegum rapidly unraveling before me. Places like Keene will be decimated without fuel and/or skyrocketing fuel costs. A crashing economy would be painful for everyone, but especially for rural, up-and-coming areas like Keene; former industrial towns which are just starting to come back.
It is a call to political arms, with the New Hampshire primary behind us and the November general election ahead, it seems like yet another consequential election is coming up. Given the state of the U.S. and N.H., that seems far from hyperbolic, maybe you participate out of greater concerns, but maybe the spring cherry blossoms move you. Yet it has never been better to get out and participate in this election cycle.
Timothy Fitzpatrick can be contacted at
tfitzpatrick@kscequinox.com
