What I couldn't see

Steve Schwartzman

May 5

The cedar sage (Salvia roemeriana) in wooded areas of my neighborhood was out in force by the middle of April. I found plenty of those plants to photograph in Great Hills Park, and then on April 17th I spent time with a group of them on a rocky embankment along Morado Circle. It's not unusual to see cedar sage flowers that have fallen off, but one really caught my attention—and caught is an apt word. The flower had landed on a leaf and miraculously was standing upright. I assumed the base of the fallen flower had happened to land in a small hole in the leaf, and that accounted for the flower's apparent defiance of gravity. After taking some pictures of the prodigy I touched it, and only then from the way it swung about did I realize that a strand of spider silk, still invisible to me, had kept the flower from falling over. My 100mm macro lens and camera sensor resolved the strand of silk that my unaided eyes couldn't see. Now your eyes get to see it. They also get to see some nearby cedar sage buds that had begun opening.

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As much as I've been the bearer of reassurance in my photographs from nature, I've also been the bearer of increasingly dismal social news in my commentaries. For the past decade, and especially since the moral panic of 2020, "wokeism" has rapidly been taking over our institutions. Medicine is no exception. Some professors of medicine have taken to denying biological sex. Medical schools are already plotting to make gender ideology and racist ideology required parts of their curriculum. Faculty and staff who won't pledge fealty to those delusional and hateful things will risk getting fired, and people who apply to work there but don't show evidence of sufficiently "woke" fervor won't get hired in the first place. Medical students will face the same kinds of pressure. You can read the distressing details in John D. Sailer's article on the website of the National Association of Scholars.

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