I hate spring. I hate it because it means the end of an exciting basketball season and the start of a dreadfully long and intensely dull baseball season. I hate it because it means summer reruns, which now begin long before summer arrives. Most of all, I hate spring because its most distinctive and wide spread characteristic is the reawakening of plant lust.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a killjoy or a prude. I don’t get angry when someone else (or something else) is having a better time than me. I’m also sophisticated enough to realize the necessity of reproductive activity in all manner of flora and fauna. It’s the way that different beings go about their reproductive business that gets me angry. I mean, I don’t impose my sexual proclivities on the plant world, so why does it have to impose its proclivities on me?
This isn’t an embarrassment issue. I’m not one of those crazies who thinks we ought to put underpants on dogs and cats in the name of modesty, and I certainly don’t think we should apply similar garments to the stamens and pistils of our plant friends. If nothing else, the cost of doing so would be prohibitive. No. I merely seek an end to the sadistic imposition of one life form’s hanky panky upon another life form as a matter of equity and justice.
We live in a litigious society. I suppose that were I the sort of person who seeks to make everything right in court, I could find an attorney to handle this matter in the usual way. And indeed, if I did, It wouldn’t be that hard a case a win.
We wouldn’t have to shop around very hard to find a favorably disposed judge and jury composed of people similarly afflicted—especially after the really dry winter we’ve just had. Identifying deep-pocket codefendants among human cultivators would also be a cinch. I can even see a high-profile television pick-up, a shocked Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes saying: "You mean to say this has been going on for thousands of years, and afflicted millions of people, and the cultivators of these heedless pollinators have done nothing, absolutely nothing, to protect the victims or make them whole?"
Yes, I could do it that way. And maybe it will come to that. But I’d prefer talking about it first like caring life forms and working out some kind of voluntary solution.
Here’s my offer: Do it all day, every day, for months on end. Just get yourself another vector. The open airways are my airways, too. And if we can’t share these airways equitably, if your reproductive closure adds up to my nasal closure, we have a problem. Use bees to spread your stuff. Use birds or animals. Heck, use the Postal Service or advertise in local newspapers, for all I care. Just get out of my face.
We’ll, I’ve said my piece. The spores are now in their court. I hope I won’t have to take this matter to another, less friendly, jurisdiction.
