53

The great Way is easy,
yet people prefer the side paths.
Be aware when things are out of balance.
Stay centered within the Tao.

When rich speculators prosper
while farmers lose their land;
when government officials spend money
on weapons instead of cures;
when the upper class is extravagant and
irresponsible
while the poor have nowhere to turn—
all this is robbery and chaos.
It is not in keeping with the Tao.

Tao Te Ching by Lao-tsu trans. by Stephen Mitchell

We have come to this.

Yesterday as planned a group of us met late in the afternoon to discuss the rise of Right-wing nihilism. Our basis was as 2025 article by New York Times columnist David Brooks. The “elephant in the room” the looming reality “not to be spoken of” was the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Kirk stoked the nihilism described by Brooks in our essay.

It is difficult to speak of the death of another human being. No one living knows what death means, let alone what it is like to die. Death is a boundary, a border crossing that will define all of us, as is and was our birth. What first hand knowledge does anyone have of the birth boundary either? Border crossings are frames within which we make sense of our lives. Birth and death frames everything in between, the lens of focus upon the content of the one life that we fortuitously have.

I only knew Charlie Kirk’s name, and little else. He was a rabble-rouser, a hard core Trump partisan, and his stock in trade was verbal assault, up close and personal on college campuses. Trafficker in violence, wagering that true violence will not come to him. Kirk was thirty-one years old. Youth is defined by the illusion that one will live forever. In the prime of life, feeling that élan vital one is prepared to dodge every bullet. However true violence is no abstraction.

True violence is material. Violence comes as a slap across the face delivered by a man to his wife, or to his child. Or maybe it’s serrated name-calling, to draw “blood” from selfhood of a gay man or woman. Violence is frequently expressed by acquiring a distressed company, dismembering the parts for profit, paying no attention to the men and women laid off, stripped of livelihoods. Livelihoods are bought and sold as equities, no twinge of concern for a fellow human. And then there’s violence that comes in the form of a Full Metal Jacket bullet, like flipping a switch, turning off a light…

Violence at first glance seems a short cut, that side-path, an easy-get of what one wants.

As I said we barely touched upon the death of Charlie Kirk.

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A final note about the confusion that reigns in America, and if news reports are any indication, in other European societies as well. The words for “robbery” and for “way-making” are pronounced with identical sound in Chinese. Homonyms. Need it be said they are diametrically opposed?!