The Stepford Gardeners

I have no difficulty with having neighbours
as long as we are the right distance from each other
for our neighbourliness to be mutually beneficial.

Where being the good neighbour gets harder
is where I have to visit one of them
and pass so many more of their gardens
which have there are so few plants
and they are so lacking in character.

Most people over sixty will know something
about the film 'The Stepford Wives',
the modern feminist gothic thriller
and the perfect looking women
who live on a perfect looking estate
where their husbands are plastic surgeons
who secretly keep their wives looking young
through emotionally abusive plastic surgery. 

From the distance of my wild garden
I can't avoid seeing my neighbours
daily employing the Stepford Gardeners
sterilizing the world one garden at a time.   

Un-Neighbourliness Refined

Charity as legalised theft, which shrinks the life of the poor
is well known. Modern tax laws in rich countries now reward it.
From Pre-Victorian times onward the rich and powerful
in England divided the poor between the worthy and the unworthy.
The worthy and blindly obedient worked hard to keep themselves
in poverty but out of penury, the better to stay away
from the then modernised workhouse where the unworthy
displaced from labour on the land and the factories
were pushed into squalor as a disincentive
to free people like them, people free to be unworthy.

The inheritors of that cruel logic of help-designed
-to-help-the-helper-more than-the-helped now live
in the third world. Where like work house managers,
local cleptocracies shrink the self government of others
to something less than useless. In third world countries
this raises the value of bribes and forces the populous
to fend for themselves in confining circumstances.

At a crisis point western charities try to help the poorest
and most displaced in refugee camps, by providing
the simplest of means to keep them from dying.
But as always the devil lurks in the detail.

Much more money is raised at home than is spent abroad,
and the media profile of the charity comes to matter
more to it's donors than any actual effect it has of being a help.
More than that, nobody dares do enough toward
improving the governance in poorly ruled countries
because that would be seen as 'being invasive',
particularly when bad government gives people
who might otherwise do nothing
so many vital good works to perform.