And you tell me, friends,
that there ought be no controversy about taste and tasting?

     But all life is a matter of dispute about taste and tasting!

Taste: that is to weigh at the same time,
and scales
and a one-who-weighs;
and all the worse for every living thing
that would attempt life without dissension
about weight and scales and weigher!

     ~*~

Should he become disillusioned
with his glorious state-of-mind,
this infallible one, then only then,
will his beauty begin
— and then only
will I taste him
and find him savory.

And only when he turns away from himself
will he overleap his own shadow
— and truly! into his sun.*

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Thomas Common, Part II, The Sublime Ones, page 114

Without any proof, often I entertain the suspicion the most intractable differences between us Americans can be boiled down to “taste.” The radical incongruity of viewpoint is a gap of taste that yawns as deep as the Grand Canyon. Taste! Not the response of one’s tongue, but that sense of propriety of attitude toward other homo sapiens, yes, towards another mammal of our kind, irrespective of race/skin color, ethnic background, or mother language.

Perhaps you have viewed the television commercial featuring Homeland Security Director Christi Noem asserting a policy of pursuit and exile for anyone present here without legal status, full stop. No qualifications, simply a stone-cold intent to violently cleanse the population of all non-citizens. I cannot excise from my mind the clips of long lines of men in underwear- heads shaved, prodded single file into the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). Officially, it can hold up to 40,000 inmates, the cells hold 65 to 70 prisoners each. 

In summary persons present for any reason, without rock solid legal status, male or female, child or infant are to be hunted, to be disposed of as an unwelcome feral animal. And I’ll say it once again: it’s all a matter of taste.

Why in the name of all that is decent must I bring this up?

Until I am shocked, awakened by the egregious inhumanity of this behavior, I will find a rationalization, a means to deny the brutal truth of the matter.

How can we not turn away from ourselves, to leap over the American-shadow, symbolized by Trump and the white nationalists?

We must. Even if it means leaping into our sun!

*I have exercised a writer’s freedom to substitute contemporary terms for some of the obsolete language in the translation.