Sinuous, dry, mysterious

A bit of mealy blue sage (Salvia farinacea) was flowering in the northeast quadrant of Mopac and US 183 on August 14th. Even more than the fresh flowers, this sinuous dry seed stalk caught my photographic fancy.

 

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I call your attention to Harlyn De Luna’s August 8th article for The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, “Speech isn’t violence; it’s how we avoid it.” The article is in line with something I’ve been pointing out in recent commentaries: the way transgressive activists do violence to our language by pushing to redefine familiar words in ideological ways. Among the most flagrant attempts at redefinition have been man, woman, and mother. De Luna’s article focuses on another: violence. The word’s meaning has always been grounded in physical force, even if writers have used it metaphorically from time to time (as I did two sentences ago when I wrote about doing violence to our language). Now activists want to sever the word from physical reality altogether, so that any idea they disagree with is automatically “violence.” They even go one step further with the rhyming slogan “Silence is violence.” Not only does saying something that the activists disagree with count as violence, so does saying nothing at all. You must mouth the statements they want you to mouth or else you’re committing an act of violence.

You’re welcome to read Harlyn De Luna’s article about that.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman