SWORDS INTO PLOWSHARES, SPEARS INTO PRUNING HOOKS©

George G. Epp

Forward: There’s a prevailing view in our world that militaries and their tools are necessary to protect us from aggression by the militaries and their tools of other countries. My Anabaptist/Mennonite heritage and 80 years of living have taught me that it’s not so, that this philosophy is the same as saying, “We are untrustworthy and misanthropic, hopelessly selfish and greedy and so we must assume that other nations are probably as evil—and likely more—than we are.”

                The settling of differences is often achieved through diplomacy and negotiation but sometimes through violence that escalates until terrible damage and death is the result. The difference lies in the possession of weapons, pure and simple. The Kingdom Christ promised will be a disarmed, peaceable realm, where (metaphorically) “the lion will sleep with the lamb and the wolf and the sheep will graze side by side,” and (metaphorically) “every man will enjoy life seated peacefully under his own olive tree, being blest by the summer sun and the trilling of birds.”

                To this end, I offer this parable.

 

Drill Sergeant Yoshie Hauptmann wouldn’t have needed the alarm to go off at 6:30 every morning. He’d disciplined his body to fall asleep at 11:30 precisely, and as precisely to wake up at 6:30, although he was as punctual at setting the alarm as he was about everything. Just in case. You never know. Be prepared. The devil’s in the details.

                On August 5^th, 2022, he rolled over, sat up gently so as not to wake Anika and padded into the walk-in closet to retrieve the uniform Anika had so carefully brushed the night before. It wasn’t there. He backed out of the closet and closed the door in response, probably, to the ubiquitous advice that unplugging a thing that’s not working usually cures the problem. He opened the door again, but a white robe hung in the precise spot where his uniform should be. He woke Anika. She was as befuddled as he was.

                His duplicate uniform was at the cleaners and they wouldn’t be open until 10:00. He donned street clothes and drove to the barracks. A barrack’s-load of raw recruits were wondering around the parade ground, some in pajamas, some in their underwear. They gathered around Drill Sergeant Hauptmann and informed him that where they’d hung their uniforms and street clothes last night, there were only blue jeans and Hawaiian shirts. Also, that they’d been awakened at 7:00 by what sounded like a choir singing something about sheep grazing.

                With that news, DS Hauptmann took out his cell phone and dialed headquarters in Tel Aviv. They already knew something was up, had already decided that Iran was retaliating for the previous week’s bombing of a nuclear enrichment facility by Israel. “The air force has been ordered to scramble all fighter jets, and land-based-missile command to be ready for further orders. Do your best to …”

                The call was interrupted by “Hang on, Hauptmann,” and the click of a phone being hung up.

                The news flashed down the chain of command via Twitter. When pilots (in street clothes) ran to the hangers, they found every jet had been replaced by a skateboard and where bombs were stored ready to be attached to planes, there was a bowling alley. Missile command examining the silos’ contents found that the ICBMs had mysteriously turned into massive heaps of Swiss Cheese, complete with holes.

                The entire base was gripped by excruciating fear. Officers and privates ran back and forth between rooms, between buildings and the parade ground was awash in Hawaiian shirted civilians carrying baseball bats, hockey sticks, anything they could get their hands on.

Fortunately, relief followed hard upon all this devastating news: Iran, Saudi Arabia, the USA, Russia, Australia, Great Britain were all struggling to understand how their entire military apparatus had turned into food, flowers, game venues and identical Hawaiian shirts. Nobody knew who was who, rank and privilege lost all their markers and most amazingly, every economy discovered that the last year’s military spending had been reimbursed and governments were awash in cash.

Prince William was up early, dressed for a portrait photograph to be taken by Amelia Standingstill, Great Britain’s most celebrated female portrait photographer. At 7:00 precisely, Amelia gasped as she saw poor William through her viewfinder without hat, coat, pants, epaulets and medals and him looking down and wishing he chosen boxers instead of briefs.

                Several arms manufacturing CEOs took their own lives, too hastily, turns out; their factories remained intact, except that all had been retooled to produce solar panels and tidal generators. Go figure!

 

Jerry Pinkstable and Hank Surinamy were neighbours on Colonel Wogey Street in Denver Colorado. Jerry’s first thought when he heard the news of very strange doings was to prepare to defend his family. He reached in and felt around in his night table drawer, but his pistol was gone. In a panic, he ran downstairs to his gun cabinet and found when he opened it that his hunting rifles had turned into gardening tools and his last-ditch, assault rifle was now a cricket bat. Jerry has never, ever played cricket. Somebody goofed.

He ran out to make sure the gate in his chain link property fence was locked and discovered no fence and no gate. He ran back into the house and placed Jonathon’s and Sidney’s miniature baseball bats near the door, then ran back to the kitchen for a knife, but wherever a knife had been, there was now a pizza cutter. He felt silly holding one in his hand and making a few ridiculous thrusts with it. He dropped it back into the drawer.

                He picked up a bat and stepped gingerly out onto the front porch. He was startled to see that “that bastard Hank” was mirroring his stance and his weapon on the Surinamy’s front porch. Hank’s six-year-old son stepped out beside Hank, looked at Jerry and said, “Daddy, if your guns went away, and Jerry’s guns went away, prob’ly everybody’s guns went away.” Jerry’s defiant demeanour left, replaced by a sheepishness at the wisdom of a child. He dropped the bat on the lawn, as did Hank and both felt that a ton of rocks had been lifted from their shoulders, although it would take some time before they could admit it.

 

A chapter of Hell’s Angels had bought three adjacent houses on Grady Street in Summerdale, Ontario back in 2019. Every other house on that block had been FOR SALE ever since, but they didn’t care. They tore down the middle house and erected a large garage for their motorcycles. Their weapons were kept on their persons or at their bedsides. Not prone to early rising and having no use for establishment news, they would experience the upheaval of theirs and everybody else’s world for themselves.

                At 10:15, a bearded, barbed-wire-tattooed Jason Farthing awoke, sat up, scratched his ample belly, pulled on a black muscle shirt and reached for the leather jacket that he’d left hanging on the bedpost. What came away was not his jacket, but a plaid sportscoat whose only nod to leather was in the elbow patches. Jason hung it back up, shook his head, went for a pee—in response, probably, to the ubiquitous advice that unplugging a thing that’s not working usually cures the problem—and came back. The plaid sportscoat was still there, hanging from the bedpost. What’s more, the hand gun he kept under his pillow at night was not under his pillow.

                Jason pounded on every bedroom door in the house screaming, “OK, you jackasses, who’s the wise guy. Joke’s over!” A few doors opened, a few arms appeared, a few hands gingerly held out plaid sportscoats with leather elbow protectors and every coat with a pen clipped into the breast pocket.

                Eventually the world news registered via Aaron “Frisky” Patterson’s Facebook account. He rushed out to the garage and, you guessed it, where fourteen Harleys and Yamahas and Phantom Blacks had stood, there now were fourteen high-end racing bikes.

Aaron was probably the most astute of the chapter membership. First, he thought, “Strange, this is not military hardware.” Then he thought, “Military hardware intimidates; motorcyclists in packs wearing Hell’s Angels decals are intimidating, that’s what we set out to be. Whoever did this is smart, like me.”

He ran his hand across the new leather of the bicycle’s banana seat. It reminded him of the first back he’d had as a kid back in Laird, Saskatchewan. He went back upstairs and put on the plaid sportscoat with the leather elbow pads and took the racing bike out for a spin.

                It felt really good except that the jacket didn’t match his leather pants. He stopped on a country road, took off his pants and hung them over a barbed-wire fence and gleefully headed west in his boxer shorts and the greenish-plaid sportscoat with the leather elbow protectors.

                He was enthralled by the singing of the birds on the fence wires.

 

Joe Biden was nearing the midpoint of his presidency and like everyone, he was shaken by the news as it unfolded from around the world. Most astounding to him were the images of the Pentagon on TV—before and after. Whoever or whatever force was at work had exercised some cosmic geometry and turned it into a circle. Furthermore, it was now a school; offices with their maps and strategic planning documents and international intelligence apparatus were all gone, replaced by classrooms. The signage out front and back now read “Plowshare College,” and President Joe chuckled because he’d actually been listening in church and knew where the name came from. His attorney-general opined that it must have something to do with agriculture, an easy mistake to make.

               

Prime Minister Trudeau in Canada approached the new governor-general with a request to prorogue parliament, a request that was denied. “You’re suddenly befuddled and clueless, Justin,” she said. “and you can’t wrap your head around no fighter jets, no tanks, no army. Well join the club. Go back and write a budget and a throne speech. Trust me. It’s gonna be fun with all that new cash and all those personnel freed up to fight climate change. Right up your alley, nuh?”

                And the world unfolded as it should. War- and terrorism-refugees started to drift home, people (who seem always to need some kind of a war) became obsessed with saving the planet, cleaning up oceans, rivers and lakes, planting trees, building renewable energy infrastructure, building better hospitals and better schools, ensuring food security, all these and more creating jobs, jobs, jobs.

Street gangs filled their pockets with rocks at first, but gave that up when their thrown stones would turn into potato chips the instant they left their hand. Everyone knows how hard it is to throw a potato chip with any degree of accuracy. A few, in desperation, turned themselves into book clubs.

                Most importantly, the world of the poor, the rich, the powerful, the ordinary, celebrities and heroes, artists and poets, writers and readers, laborers and thinkers, all could finally count on a good night’s sleep. The sounds of snoring could at times become deafening.

                CBC reported later, two years later, actually, that Putin had made a demeaning remark about the Ukrainian president at an international conference. Apparently, the Ukrainian president stuck his tongue out at Putin in response, at which the UN general secretary was reported to have remarked, “My goodness, will this aggression and counter-aggression cycle never end?”

                In Israel/Palestine all the walls and barriers came down, missiles and personnel weapons were nowhere to be found. And amazingly here, the power that had demilitarized the nations had added a twist: whether faces and clothes were different or just appeared to be, observers could no longer tell who was Jewish and who was Arab. Authorities soon tired of having to ask people whether they were Jewish or Palestinian before telling them whether or not they were allowed to stand or walk, here or there. There was nothing for it, finally, but to declare the entire area a democratic, secular state with politicians elected by universal suffrage, police armed with little more than good will and compassion, and everyone worshipping the same spirit of God’s goodness and mercy … side by side.

The Beginning

               

The Crown Rust Tempest in a Teapot

OATS

 

Trevor Lake noticed it for the first time while walking through a ripening oats field on an otherwise-glorious July morning—July 26^th, 2025, to be precise. Somehow, the individual plants looked more … well … tired than they should. He pulled one entire plant up and examined the roots, then the leaves where he noticed reddish splotches forming. He examined a few more plants, walked in toward the middle of the field and discovered that the spots were fewer, but still general. It seemed as if someone had gone through the field with a sprinkler of rust-coloured paint. The worst areas were right along the creek bank.

                Trevor knew what it was: Some variety of fungal rust. But only after looking it up on line and realizing that there were several dozens of oat diseases ranging from viral to bacterial to fungal, Crown Rust being the most common. He’d grown mostly canola and wheat until the passing of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic had shifted the demand toward locally-grown and consumed food crops, and the price of canola plummeted.

                Over coffee at the PetroCan on the highway that runs through Shermen, Saskatchewan, Trevor announced what he had seen, thinking to warn neighbours who’d made the same crop-switch for the same reasons.  “You’d better look at your oats,” he said, “especially you, Sam. You’ve got Buckthorn growing along the creek and it’s a primary host for the fungus’ sexual development.”

                “What?”

                “What?” was exactly what Trevor had said when he first waded through Danika Thompson’s column in GRAINEWS. He’d read it three times before concluding that his oat crop would probably be lucky to return input costs, that he should have bought a resistant strain of seed. “The fungus develops on the Buckthorn and migrates to live on oats … and sometimes barley, I think.”

                “What the hell is Buckthorn?”

                “Well, it’s that shrubby plant with the little yellow flowers and … and, I think, black berries.”

                Sam’s face wore a mask of skepticism. It was, in fact, Sam’s default look whenever problems went in search of solutions. “I’ll bet Monsanto or Bayer are behind this … again,” he said. “You’re probably gonna tell me next that there’s a spray I can buy for five-thousand dollars that’ll fix the problem!”

                The Monsanto/Bayer “conspiracy” to rob farmers of as much of the profits of their hard work as possible was a perennial topic at coffee row, ever since Percy Schmeiser got shafted for planting seed on which Monsanto held an exclusive patent. That was way back in the 1990s, before the two companies joined forces to perfect the art of “ripping all the profit out of agriculture and turning it over to rich corporate owners and shareholder men in suits, laughing all the way to the bank”. At least that’s how Willie Turner loved to put it to anyone prepared to listen. Willie didn’t farm; he and Don Castle were local business interests who were well aware of the fact that their good fortunes leaned heavily on the success or failure of local agriculture.

∞∞

Everybody who lives in or near one knows that rural towns have mysterious networks down which news and opinions flash at the speed of light. The dilemma of the oat crops was particularly vexing to John and Cecil Skowring who were in the middle of building a mill to capitalize on farming changes by producing locally-grown, locally-consumed rolled oats. The content of the PetroCan coffee row conversation, plus the Skowring’s complaints about their misfortune, plus the unbridled assertions on everything by Sam and his wife, Mabel, got pumped into the network in minutes. Like a Corona Virus, peculiar versions of the Crown Rust story spread through town and countryside. The Buckthorn/fungus transmission version was far too complicated to transmit in casual conversation. What wasn’t too complicated and got digested and regurgitated were the following:

• ·         Bayer put spores into their RoundUp chemical so farmers would have to buy their remedy for Crown Rust,
• ·         The Canola people were spreading rust spores with crop-spraying planes to urge farmers back to buying their seed,
• ·         The Robin Hood Mill in Saskatoon was conspiring with the canola people and Bayer/Monsanto to shut down the mill in Shermen before it even opened,
• ·         There actually was no such thing as Crown Rust; just a story made up by Trevor for some unknown reason.

The favourite explanation was the one involving crop-spraying planes; a few farmers had used them to spray RoundUp in spring; everyone had seen and heard the planes; there were far too many to just be doing weed spraying. What’s more—some said—Buckthorn isn’t a thing … nobody’s ever heard of Buckthorn and they’d know it if it existed.

                Trevor was horrified by the rumours and theories, especially after the whole thing was being attributed to him as the perpetrator of fake news, or possibly as a co-conspirator with who-knows-how- many people and companies that stood to benefit. How Trevor would benefit wasn’t included in this narrative; it was enough that he was making up a story about Buckthorn and fungi and other bullshit to cover his tracks. (“Most likely, Bayer is cutting him a fat check,” was a nuance that would be added later.)

                 Sam never checked his oat fields. Possibly because he felt more comfortable with the conspiracy theories than with the thought that come harvest time, his crop would be two-thirds or less of what he’d anticipated, and his swather and combine pickup would turn a rusty red as he harvested. He vaguely remembered stories of wheat rust in the 1950s; surely crop rust wasn’t a thing anymore.

                In desperation, Trevor tracked down freelance writer Danika Thompson, thinking to bring her to Shermen if she’d be willing to verify his news as being factual, not fake. “Why don’t you just have them read my column, you know, the one you referred to?” She had too much going on to come out now, she said.

                Trevor thought about that, but given the community climate, he guessed that the reporter would be construed as another attempt by him to cover his ass. He was right; he realized it when he got replies to emails he sent to Don, Willie and Sam. 

            There's no arguing with conspiracy theory; anything you say to the contrary tends simply to prove that you’re either in on the plot … or else have been taken in by it.

                Trevor wanted to scream, “Why the hell are you all so damned dumb?” But what would be the point? It wasn’t their lack of smarts that bound them to see conspiracy behind their problems; Sam was known to be a successful farmer and Don and Willie passable businessmen. 

                He went on line and printed all the references to Crown Rust … it made him feel better to know that he was right … according to the experts. He also read somewhere that conspiracy theories arise when there’s a power, wealth or education imbalance. That it’s natural to assume that there are elites with the power, wealth or education that allow them to move things and events … while common folk have too little of any of the three to allow them to move anything of importance, and so they feel like they’re always being done to instead of doing. They resent their powerlessness.

                He’d also read that conspiracy theories generally arise only for momentous things, like presidential assassinations, pandemics, unusual fires and such. That big things call for big explanations. This puzzled Trevor because his bringing up this Crown Rust thing was surely a tempest in a teapot. He should have been thanked for his research. He could only assume that the Monsanto/Schmeiser debacle was the big event, and he’d only been guilty of reopening that festering resentment.

                The messenger often takes the first bullet.

                What startled him most was the research that showed how impossible a massive conspiracy can be. To successfully scatter rust spores across the province would take both the cooperation and the absolute secrecy of a great many people. If among all those cooperating conspirators even one person should experience a twinge of conscience and “blow the whistle,” the conspiracy would have to collapse. Even in a family’s conspiracy to give Uncle Ike a surprise birthday party, the likelihood of total solidarity around the plan almost never happens. The article Trevor read and reread ended with, “There are no really big conspiracies, even though there are plenty of little ones.”

                Harvest came early and by August 20^th, Trevor had his oats in the bin and had washed the rust off his equipment. He went out with his tractor and a few cables and began pulling up all the Buckthorn shrubs along the creek and burning them. He was minding the bonfire when he noticed Sam’s pickup dusting across the oat stubble. Sam pulled up, exchanged a perfunctory greeting with Trevor and after a minute of both staring into the fire, said, “You never told us which variety of oats is resistant to this rust stuff.”

                Trevor pulled out his notebook and pen and wrote a couple of names, tore off the sheet and handed it to Sam. “These aren’t guaranteed to be perfect, but tests have shown them to suffer the least from Crown Rust.

                In the end, the only defenses against conspiracy-theories-run-amok … are facts. Facts experienced first hand or, at least, facts endorsed by a trusted friend.  Trevor decided that if he had the whole thing to do again, he’d invite Sam over, ask him if he knew what was happening with his oats and have him come up with the answers.

                But then, Sam had been known more than once to declare that behind the internet and the “mainstream media,” there existed a massive plot to keep the public ignorant and confused, to “bamboozle us with lies and bullshit.” At a conversation like this once, Trevor had imagined a field of thousands of reporters, social media billionaires, fat-cat politicians and corporate elites charging at an unsuspecting public with syringes full of lies ‘n bullshit, all having agreed in advance that this inoculation would be in everyone’s best interests.

                He sighed and forked another Buckthorn shrub onto the fire, watched it flare, heard it sizzle.            

 

 

                 

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