See, the Venus Flytrap is native only to the southeast of North Carolina (and a little bit of South Carolina—again, plants, maps, not really a thing) in the coastal plain near Wilmington. There’s a lot of really interesting plant and animal life down in that part of the state, but one thing that sets it apart is that the soil is actually quite nutrient-poor: it’s sandy, it’s wet, and it doesn’t have much to offer in the way of nitrogen and phosphorus, two key nutrients for plants to grow.
But nature is pretty resourceful—so instead of just withering away and dying from the lack of nutrients, the Venus Flytrap evolved a different survival strategy. It’s a carnivorous plant that traps and eats small insects and arachnids, digesting them for their nutrients in order to survive in soil that most plants just aren’t equipped for.
Eating other living things may not be what we expect from plants, but when placed under pressure from scarce resources, it’s hardly surprising that Venus Flytraps do what they have to in order to survive.
And frankly, people are the same way.
When our environments—our economies, our communities, our governments—are constrained by scarce resources, people often turn to radical action in order to survive. We’ve seen that time and time again throughout history. Sometimes that looks like revolution. Sometimes it looks like a precipitous descent into communism or fascism. Sometimes it looks like MAGA and the rise of the far right in the United States over the last few years.
People don’t feel that their government is putting sufficient investment into their communities, leading to insufficient opportunities to reach their full potential, realize the American dream, and thrive. But people don’t just lay down and accept a slow death by attrition. They lash out. They do what they think they have to. And if they feel that it’s the only option, if opportunity feels like a zero-sum game and there’s not enough to go around, they’ll vote to hurt their neighbors if they think that, in doing so, they can cannibalize their resources in order to survive.
Nutrient-poor soil creates evolutionary pressures that give rise to plants like the Venus Flytrap.
But we don’t have to go down that road. I know that things seem dire right now, and I know that we all feel a little scared about what November might hold. But I’m trying my best to present voters with a different vision for what North Carolina can be over the next four years. The GOP has been leaching nutrients from the soil, whittling away our state’s savings, cutting revenues, and withholding investment from communities that badly need it. It doesn’t have to be that way.
We can choose a different way of governing at the ballot box in four months: one that values our people and seeks to create a world where opportunity is abundant and we can all thrive alongside each other. It doesn’t take much, just a different set of priorities from the people at the helm of the ship of our state.
And we’ll only get there if we stand together. Just this morning, I saw an article in Axios about how the NCGOP is getting ready to pump an unprecedented amount of campaign funds into TV ads in some of our most competitive districts—and Democrats have to be ready to respond in kind if we’re getting to get our message out there and show voters that someone is fighting for them.
