According to the esteemed NPR itself …
If you buy or get flowers for the holiday, there is a very good chance that they will come from Colombia, and a further decent chance that they were grown on an illegally ripped up and ruined chunk of Colombian Cloud Forest.
Outlaw local capitalists just trying to keep their families fed. Multinational corporations coordinating 500 planeloads of floral joy each year for the festival of the pink hearts.
I don’t repeat this story to be a killjoy, or unromantic. I’m just staying on topic for another day.
Point is, to be blessed with living the American way of life, and having the associated standard of living, is of necessity to be oblivious about the murderous damage that routinely does, and to be privileged to not have to think about it, in a thousand different invisible and insidious ways.
You Celebrate this holiday or that in the way you are culturally conditioned to do so.
And every other day of the year too.
Sending the flowers and being warmed by your own loving intentions when doing so does not automatically equal qualifying as a truly Loving Person, in the end.
Just as crusading globally with these or those Good intentions (liberty, equality, democracy, Success!) doesn’t make your country and its shared culture … Good.
Internally, I’ve thrown up my hands in despair for the most part about the utility of shrieking about politics–the day to day kind, the red and blue kind.
It’s all ‘good’ fun to watch the debates and vote and boo and cheer and post our bitchy little comments on social or antisocial media, and root for this corporation or that one.
Oh that Orange devil, look what he’s done now.
He’s certainly not America!
But of course, neither were drooling Joe or his diverse henchperson, babe.
No, America is you and me.
Buying flowers online in that sentimental way, and turning a blind eye to the bulldozed forests and the dead parrots, the buffalo and passenger pigeons, the human beings that our acts of Love, or savvy, leave in their wake. And feeling all Right about it.
Or: spending our mental lives and spiritual bandwidth recycling, and trying to spend with a conscience.
And feeling all Right about that.
***
I know that you’re never going to engage with me seriously about alternatives, in part because you don’t think you need an alternative.
I know what you think anyway, about that guy living in the park I’ve been flagwaving for, or the other losers, living in a van down by the river, Haw!
And yeah, about me too.
How am I? Kinda sad and resigned about that, on some level down deep. Not, I hope, out of any self-pity.
About the whole very civilized mess, about its impending death anyway, about the fact that the horror of a family Monopoly game is only a pale metaphor for our very real and quite broken dynamic, interpersonally and internationally.
I have done all that I could?
To see the evil and the good without hiding. You must help me if you can. Doctor,
my eyes:
Tell me what is wrong …
Was I unwise
to leave them
open for so long?
As I have wandered through this world, and as each moment has unfurled
I’ve been waiting to awaken from these dreams.
People go just where they will.
I never noticed them until I got this feeling
that it’s later than it seems.
***
May you have an intimate and warmly venereal pagan day, in spite of everything.