The many-petaled spiral of the English garden rose against the green of a mown lawn and the blue of a nearly cloudless sky brings feelings of wellbeing to our hearts and minds. It sparks a spring day with red, yellow or orange. It is lovely and gracious, while its thorns bespeak personality and attitude: Be civil, young man, young lady. What could be more English?
Yet, unlike the merely five-petaled wild rose that symbolized the fifteenth-century wars between the Yorkists and Lancastrians, today’s garden rose isn’t English. Not originally. It was imported from China, just like tea.
Those were England’s empire days, when it exploited a weakened China with opium as its currency. Today, we sue companies for addicting their customers to their drugs.
As such, the English garden rose is an ill-gotten gain. Valuables gained unjustly should be restored. But in this case, the debt is both too huge and incalculable. No amount of money, no matter how targeted, could cover it. What England gained is priceless.
Still, suppose a monetary sum were somehow arrived at, should England pay it to China even though it has a repressive, authoritarian government? They’d want to ensure the money does good rather than deepen corruption. In that case, should England insist the People’s Republic first have in place a democracy established over a period of, say, decades so the money has a better chance of going to the people who deserve and need it? But that would be deferring responsibility to a future generation.
Then, should England eradicate all the roses it inherited from an imperialist era? In good conscience, could they even contemplate destroying all traces of something as beautiful as the garden rose? What good would be served? We can’t wish away the sins of our fathers, nor mothers for that matter, any more than our descendants will be able to wish away ours. But if we have any decency at all, just as we learn from the good our ancestors did, we will learn from their mistakes.
The many-petaled spiral of the English garden rose against the green of a mown lawn and the blue of a nearly cloudless sky brings feelings of wellbeing to our hearts and minds. It sparks a spring day with red, yellow or orange. It is lovely and gracious, while its thorns bespeak personality and attitude: Be civil, young man, young lady. What could be more English?
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