It’s all the flowers’ fault.

The path up from and out of the Serengeti must have been long and tough. All those beasties bent on having us for lunch. All those nights of drenching rain followed by days of relentless sun.

Struggle, struggle, struggle.

Survive, survive, survive.

Clearly, some did or none of us would be here today.

What a climb.

Up and out of a world which a sizeable subset of humanity still views as entirely "bloody in tooth and claw." Call those ones the "daddies."

Another subset has a different view of things because along the way, every now and then, when, hungry and exhausted, we were near despair, what had the day before been a dreary, muddy, monochromatic plain would burst forth in a sea of rainbow colors. And this subset not only noticed, we remembered.

Flowers here, flowers there, flowers everywhere.

Which surely gave our put-upon forebears pause for thought. And—worse yet—cause for hope.

imagine how different the world today, and of course humanity, would be if the landscape did not occasionally sprinkle itself with ridiculously beautiful flowers. There would be no answer to the often-convincing orders of the might-makes-right crowd, the when-the-going-gets-tough-the-tough-get-going crowd, who have over the millennia generally had their way and have managed to screw up era after era after era, all the while proclaiming at the top of their unpleasant voices, "Daddy knows best!"

But the bleak world was not to be in the bleak perfection the daddies sought. Mainly because of the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la.

What a bunch of troublemakers those little blossoms turned out to be. Lying about meadows with such disarming beauty, filling forest glades with such effortless ease, painting whole mountainsides with the most naïve nonchalance.

Think what effect the shameless, periodic displays had on us passersby as we bloodily clawed our way up from there to here. Most of us, being too busy clawing, hardly gave them a second glance. But that wee subset of humanity glanced, did an existential double-take, and fell victim to the flowers’ seductive powers.

Next thing you know, poets were writing poetry, designers were designing temples, artists were painting bull heads on cave walls, and before long Beethoven, at the end of an otherwise interminable symphony, planted a simple, maddeningly unforgettable little drunken ditty in our heads and hearts.

And it’s all the flowers’ fault.

If the political and financial roughriders and their legions of camp followers want to place blame for what they see as the subversive works and wasted lives of those who question their daddy-wisdom, it should fall squarely on the violet, the petunia, the rose, the tulip, and of course the pansy. Without them and the cursed memories of them and the resultant hope and—yes—joy, how much more secure the Gauleiters, the camp captains, and the jail wardens would be in their beds.

How much easier it would be for the tough to keep going in a flowerless world.

If the world is not the prison they want it to be, it’s not our fault, not the fault of those of us who seeing beauty once seek it out again and who failing to find it set out to create it anew. Our power is nothing compared to the might of the night-loving daddies—were it not for our little bepetaled friends.

Alas, for the daddies, no matter how much blood they spill, no matter how much wealth they amass, here comes spring one more time, and no matter how many chemicals they strew, pop pop pop, the true subversives appear among the weeds lifting their absurdly colorful heads to the sun. By the million. By the billion. Again and again and again.

What sweet revenge. As the daddies cry all the way to the charnel house of history, we who lurk alongside their awful path in fields of morning glory know it’s all the pansies’ fault.