More from the beach

Steve Schwartzman

Oct 3

On September 19th we spent hours on Galveston Island. One of the plants that drew my attention formed distinctive mounds wider than they are high. I recognized it as a species of Croton; it turned out to be Croton punctatus, appropriately called gulf croton and beach tea. One website says that "it forms compact, seemingly manicured mounds in dunes that are accumulating sand and tends to disappear from eroding landscapes." In the top picture, the grass behind the croton is sea oats, Uniola paniculata, which you last saw here from the Florida panhandle in 2019. In the second picture, the wildflowers behind the even broader mound of gulf croton are beach sunflowers, Helianthus debilis, which the post two days ago showed you a big colony of.

Alan Dershowitz's new book, The Price of Principle: Why Integrity Is Worth the Consequences, praises American philosopher John Rawls.

He contemplated a nether world in which none of us knows whether we will be rich or poor, male or female, Black or white, Republican or Democrat, healthy or sick, intelligent or average, young or old. Blinded by this "veil of ignorance" we must articulate principles that would be maximally fair to all of us without any of us knowing into which categories we would fit in the real world. So even if one wanted to act out of self or group interest, he could not, because he would not know what he would be or what group he would belong to when the time came to apply the principles.

The laudable moral stance of treating everyone fairly, in the same way, is quickly falling out of fashion among a segment of our population. That unfortunately increasing faction insists on favoring people in certain groups and disfavoring—discriminating against—people in certain other groups, even though that discrimination violates the "equal protection" clause of the 14th Amendment as well as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and all U.S. state constitutions.