The challenge of weed as a metaphor for broader societal issues

THE INFINITE LAWN: You can throw the intruder in a place where it cannot re-root or scatter seed. When one starts to uproot a weed, immediately another one springs up a little further away, and another, and another. In short, that patch of turf that seemed to require only a few trimmings turns out to be a lawless jungle. 

Nothing left but weeds? Worse still: the bad weeds are so thickly interspersed with the good ones 

that you can’t get your hands in the middle and pull. It seems that a complicit understanding has been created between the seed and wild herbs, an easing of the barriers imposed by inequalities of birth, a resigned tolerance to degradation. Some wild herbs, in and of themselves, do not have an evil or insidious air at all.