The Half-Wit and the Emperor

The beginings of my realization came, as all beginings do, with a single, extraordinary event, though it did not seem so extraordinary at the time.

It was spring, or coming into spring, to be more precice. I wandered down the narrow streets of my hometown, the March chill invading my body, though not unpleasantly. I paid little attention to my surroundings at first. The short, squat houses with black, staring windows. The lawns and gardens all brown and sticky, the leafless trees, all just sitting there, like dead things. The winter was an unusually warm one (everyone was blaming a phenomenon known as El Niño), but still little had survived. I walked on, listening to my boots clacking on the concrete slabs that made up the narrow sidewalk. The snow had not quite left yet, but was offering only a token resistance against the gaining strength of the sun.

And then I saw it. Nestled on the lee side of a stone in some sticky brown garden, was a spot of green. I bent down for a closer look, kneeling in the brown mush of the garden, soaking the knees of my jeans. There, amongst all the dead things, amongst the rot and decay brought on by winter, was a flower.

Now, a flower is a fairly simple thing. My mother gardens in the summer, and I fear that I see no end of flowers. This was different. I looked at the delicate green stem, the paper thin shell that protected the new blossom, and I was changed. Before me was life. Not just a flower, but LIFE, in all its glory. Against all odds that flower had survived. Milllions of years of competition with other species, insects, animals, harsh winters and mild ones, and above all, the mightiest of predators, man, had all been thwarted to bring that flower to that place, and at that time. That such a tiny thing could face those odds and prevail is nothing short of a miracle.

So I say to you, it does not matter who has the most money, for money is only paper. It does not matter who said what to whom, or who did what to whom. These are things for the petty, for the insecure, and for the blind, and I was once counted as one of their number. What matters, is that through some lucky accident of fate, and against all odds, we exist. We are here and we thrive. We have persevered in the face of true power, and we have won. To lower ourselves to pointless melodrama and petty vindictiveness (as I myself have done) is an insult to who and what we are. It is weak, and we are better than that, if we believe it strongly enough.

There, that is what I see. Hate me if you will.