Ground zero for wildflowers west of Austin

Steve Schwartzman

May 28

If Pflugerville has been ground zero for wildflowers on the prairie east of Austin this spring, Inks Lake State Park an hour west of our home could qualify for the same title in its rocky area. So we confirmed on May 26th when we spent hours out there. Scenes like these two with wildflowers blanketing the ground were common almost everywhere we looked. In the top view, the predominant species was Helenium amarum var. badium, known as brown bitterweed for the dark disk at the center of each flower head's yellow rays. That species appears in the second view, too, along with the somewhat larger dark-centered yellow flower heads of Coreopsis basalis, known as coreopsis, golden-wave, and goldenmane tickseed. The mostly red flower heads are firewheels, Gaillardia pulchella, which have appeared in many recent posts.

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Here's another passage from Yeonmi Park's 2023 book While Time Remains:

"America is a racist, imperialist, evil, greedy country that is more responsible than any other for war, injustice, cruelty, inequality, and terror around the world. We will never rest until American capitalism is overturned, the American military and police state are dissolved, and American democracy is exposed as nothing more than a corrupt sham."

Question: If you had to bet, to whom would you attribute this quote? A North Korean television broadcaster? An Iranian government cleric? A professor at Columbia? A U.S. congressperson? My guess is you'd probably wager as little money as possible on such a bet, because it's genuinely too hard to know! It could just as easily be an ISIS general as a junior product manager at Twitter. To someone who's lived 50 percent of her life in each world—half in the anti-American authoritarian dictatorship, and half in the land of the free itself—this has been quite the shock. How did we get to the point where American children and North Korean children are being fed fairly similar propaganda about the United States?

The parallels are doubly shocking when you consider the kinds of people who espouse these views. In North Korea, the people you hear railing against America are underfed teachers, malnourished children, frightened parents, and elites whose livelihoods depend on the Kim crime family. That doesn't make their hatred and ignorance excusable, but at least it makes some sense. In America, however, the people railing against their own country are often overfed, or obsessed with intentionally limiting the amount of food they eat. Often they will "speak out" against American history, society, capitalism, and democracy on an American social-media platform from their American phone or computer, or on the campus of a world-class American university, or on the street with the permission of American government authorities and the protection of American police officers. North Koreans say such things because if they don't, they'll be shot. Americans do it because they think it's fun, or because they want to acquire power and influence over other people.

It's no wonder, really, that while millions of people around the world continue to face murder, starvation, rape, torture, and enslavement, many Americans who support "social justice" are primarily concerned with the infinite multiplication of ungrammatical gender pronouns and how much "range" to give chickens before they wind up in supermarkets. It's easy to laugh at this kind of childish, nonsensical behavior—even I enjoy poking fun at it now and again—but at the end of the day, unfortunately, it's deadly serious. When a people become untethered from history, when they become unshackled from reality, when they lose the ability to understand cause and effect, they become ripe for exploitation from those who hold real power.