The cherry trees that line Washington’s Tidal Basin are not a species bred to yield tasty pies, jams and jellies. Washington’s cherry trees live mainly to display abundant clusters of delicate pinkish-white flowers. I was admiring them a couple of weeks ago, at the peak of what the Japanese call Sakura hanami — the season of viewing the cherry blossoms.
But the beauty is fleeting: The cherry blossoms last for only a couple of weeks before they fall lightly to the ground in the spring breeze. Washington is to most eyes always a beautiful city, but in those magical few days when the cherry blossoms display their efflorescence, it is extraordinary.
And it’s good to have such beauty to temper the ugliness that takes hold within some of the corridors of power that are shrouded by those cherry blossoms. The season can make you briefly forget the nasty rhetoric, the assaults on fundamental democratic norms and the eagerness to demonize political opponents – all almost normalized by many in public life in recent years, and on display daily by disreputable media outfits like Fox News.
Most of us shake our heads at the irony when a congressional committee formed to investigate supposed “weaponization” of government pushes to impeach Joe Biden – a cynical example of weaponization of the power of Congress.
We recoil at the growing influence of right-wing radicals like Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, who advance outrageous notions of conspiracies, and dismiss the 2021 Capitol riot as justified, and the attackers as “patriots.”
We’re incensed by the encouragement of anti-LGBTQ sentiment in the guise of advancing parental control over schools – and the claim that anybody who fights against such homophobia must be a “groomer” of children for pedophilia. What rot!
We could go on. So much is sordid about the American political scene these days that an aware citizen can’t help but feel discouraged. So it’s good to turn to beauty where we find it — such as in the cherry blossoms, standing in contrast to their surrounding turmoil.
Small consolation, you may think, especially since the beauty is gone so swiftly — to be replaced by the latest offensive news, and then by a season of clammy humidity across Washington. Yet it’s in their very impermanence that the cherry blossoms reveal their full glory. If they could defy nature and bloom continuously, well, then, we might not marvel so much at their radiance.
America’s capital city is graced by cherry blossoms because of a gift of 3,020 trees from Tokyo in 1912, as a token of friendship between the people of Japan and the United States. The cherry blossom tree is cherished as a national symbol in Japan, where two-thirds of the citizens are adherents of Buddhism – a religion that appreciates the transitory nature of all things. The Buddha taught, “Decay is inherent in all compound things.”
Well, decay makes a typical American downright uncomfortable. You see that in our neat lawns, our disrespect for aging and our inclination to build new rather than restore the old. It’s even obvious in how we approach horticulture: A couple of weeks back, when a powerful spring storm came through, we were grateful for a helpful neighbor with a chainsaw – even though we know that the ecology of our land might have benefited more by allowing that downed wood to remain, where it could host countless other organisms as it rotted, feeding the cycle of life.
But we Americans are less likely to follow the words of Buddha than, say, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, whose popular poem that begins, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” concludes with the refrain, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
It's not that we should envy the frailty of the cherry blossom as much as we might take comfort in the notion that impermanence attaches alike to what thrills us and what troubles us. And in politics, especially, today’s champion is quite likely to be tomorrow’s chump. That isn’t just a product of voters’ capriciousness; it’s also a result of the complexity of life: What works for a while soon enough stops working, and then we turn in another direction.
So we won’t always have Donald Trump and his lesser acolytes, to torment our sensibilities and threaten our republic. They’ll soon enough be gone — and, in that, there’s another lesson of the cherry blossom, one that might help us along in that process.
That is, in the fluttering of the blossoms to earth, we may perceive not so much a justification for complacency as a call to activism. Our own time – as brief, really, as that of the cherry blossom – suggests we need to imagine how we can make a difference, however briefly. And isn’t that a beautiful thought?
So, the cherry blossoms are now past their peak in Washington. But thank goodness for them – and for those beautiful folks among us who likewise stand apart for their willingness to use their scant time here to take on the challenge of resisting what’s unlovely and unsettling in our culture. You know who you are. Thank you.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.