Painting the Roses

Dan and I learned long ago that going out the week before Valentine’s Day for dinner is a bad idea. Not only are the prices doubled; you are likely to be in a crowded, noisy space. Somewhere along the line, the idea of a candle-lit room with music being played while couples sip their wine and speak in quiet voices as they gaze into each other’s eyes went the way of the dodo bird. It was replaced by crowded up-scale restaurants with televisions lining one wall and pop music blasting so loudly that the diners are obliged to shout at each other to be heard over the din. 

I read that restauranteurs adopted this platform in the belief that it creates “buzz, which means more people will want to be where the action is. This may have been true for me when I was in my early twenties, but being exceedingly poor during that period of my life, I never ate in restaurants; I just worked in them. These days, I don’t hear well in crowds and having six televisions flashing “BREAKING NEWS!!!” has all the ambience of being trapped in a traffic jam in a construction zone. 

Instead of going out, I usually make a special dinner, and we sip champagne and listen to jazz, or chamber music. I try to give the room a bit of sparkle with red candles and some flowers. This year, I began looking two days ago for a bouquet, since the prices for most flowers double or triple the closer we get to Valentine’s Day. But to my surprise, the store manager anticipated my move and raised the prices earlier than ever.

There were the roses, the reds and the whites, out of my price range. Additionally, there were bouquets of assorted colors of flowers and greenery, most of which had a rose included. Again, pricey and not to my taste. Yes, I could have gone to a real florist and purchased gorgeous flowers, but spending great amounts of money for something that is so transitory seems wrong. So I chose a bouquet of red and white flowers, mostly daisies and carnations wrapped in festive red tissue paper.

When I got home and removed the paper, preparing to trim the flowers and arrange them in a vase, I notices that at least half of the “red” flowers had been spray-painted, along with their stems and leaves. My first impulse was to try to wash the paint off so the poor flowers could breathe. Someone had actually taken fresh flowers and spray-painted them to make it appealing!

In the olden days you could lose your head for painting the roses red, or at least so the story goes. We have grown accepting of shrink-sizing, green-washing and many other scam-like hyphenated practices, so I suppose nobody notices when the red flowers one buys were actually spray-painted. But I do. So should you.

Have we Americans really gotten to the stage where we are so self-absorbed that we don’t notice when we’re being scammed? Do manufacturers depend upon the fact that we have become so obtuse when won’t notice when the same products we have always bought cost the same amount for a smaller and smaller amount? Have we become accustomed to communicating with our electronic devices, so much so that we neither miss nor seek hearing the human voice? Are we so estranged from nature that we think we can improve upon the perfection of a flower by spray-painting it? Have we lost the ability to determine what is factual or not? When it comes to politics, I fear the answer is yes.

We must, individually and in groups, speak up; and I don’t mean bitching to our friends on whatever social media site we use. We need to show up, physically, in places outside of our comfort zone. Then we need to talk and listen to each other. Politicians who have won over half of our country by “painting the roses red” need to be confronted with facts. The current administration’s constant “buzz” that keeps America shouting over rather than speaking with each other is a distraction technique, designed to draw attention away from the real problems America faces. Those of us who resent the shrink-sizing of laws that protect the innocent and vulnerable must not allow this chipping away at our democracy to continue.

I don’t advocate removing the heads of the red-painting knaves who are currently trying to deceive us. (We already withstood that in the 1950’s). Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts, who  terrorized Alice’s fellow travelers in Wonderland by shouting, “Off with their heads” more resembles our current president than her victims! Instead, we must stop being tricked, distracted and divided. 

Our president and all his evil little men must, in the end, be seen for what they really are. Only then can they be gathered up and, like Alice’s persecuters, be told, “Why, you’re nothing but a pack of cards!”