A tree of a hundred years
is cut and carved
into a sacrificial wood vessel
decorated with green and yellow.

The rest is thrown into a ditch.

If we compare the sacrificial vessel
with what was thrown away,
there is a difference between them
in relation to beauty and ugliness.

But they have a similarity between them:
they have both lost
the nature of the wood.

Zhuangzi by Zhuang Zhou, trans. by Hyun Hochmann and Yang Guorong, Earth and Heaven

These few lines describe a great tragedy, a catastrophe of immense proportion. A monumental destruction (desecration) of a tree longer lived than most humans. The common view of course, that parting-out such a tree was justified. A vessel exquisitely formed for a sacrificial purpose was recognized as beautiful by almost everyone. And what of the shavings, surplus limbs, containers of “debris” carted off to the dump? Who wouldn’t immediately recognize all of it to be put out of sight. Ugly!

I think of our society of immigrants. That is exactly what we are. Homo Sapiens, a mobile species, cooperating and collaborating to adapt, moving about to find what is needed that life may continue. The peoples indigenous to the continent were not different. Even without ships, nevertheless they were mobile, seeking and negotiating for what tribal groups needed.

Now to Washington has come a president asserting all power to make, and to advance policy. If you can ignore what he, and his mouthpieces say, attend only to what they do, they are excising from the population of America non-white individuals, starting with recent immigrants. By their standard of beauty and ugliness – white-is-right (beautiful.).

All else, the rest is thrown into the ditch.

Lost in the abyss of ignorance is an immigrant nation that till now, weathered the storms of wars, of a Wall Street collapse, the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2008, and most recently the visible onset of climate warming.

Many say the sacrificial vessel like the planned White House ballroom is beautiful! And a world, habitat for hundred year old trees, soon no longer resides in memory…