We’re deep into the greens of summer, when trees, like our nation, reach ever upward. Many of our earliest flags and symbols were arboreal for good reason; like a tree, our democracy has sheltered us from the elements and spread wide to embrace all denizens.  Unlike the founders, some today fail to understand the common nature and imperative of trees and democracy, seeing the branching of the latter, as it feels out its sun–a more perfect union–as diversion, perversion, dissolution, not realizing that when a tree–or democracy–stops growing, it starts to die…