60

Governing a large country
is like frying a small fish.
You spoil it with too much poking.

Center your country in the Tao
and evil will have no power.
Not that it isn’t there,
but you’ll be able to step out of its way.

Give evil nothing to oppose
and it will disappear by itself.

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

I was unsure that I’d be able to fall asleep last night. In mid evening I received information that the Jimmy Kimmel show was cancelled by ABC, which is owned by Disney. The head of the FCC implied that the network affiliates would face revocation of licenses if voluntary action were not taken to silence Kimmel.

Jimmy Kimmel had referred to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Kimmel said that the assassin was an individual “on their side.”

The apotheosis of Kirk as a representative icon of the Trump regime has been well underway, — to rip away the flimsy facade concealing race replacement theory, and a hoary patriarchal male dominance theory by Kimmel would not have been overlooked. First amendment be damned. What first amendment!? “Might makes right” is one more ancient nightmare, a resurrected ghost that haunts us at present.

Ghosts from our past have potency. As a people there’s potential of blessing, to benefit as we learn lessons from our mistakes, errors of ignorance, when we supported a slave trade, importing non-white people, living as chattels, to work our cotton and rice plantations. Another mistake, was the assumption that females are inferior to males, that males are decision makers, alone qualified to vote, to have unquestioned “say” in a household. One half our adult citizens, females were not allowed to vote until 1920.

Some of us are taking lessons from our ancestors, to great benefit.

Frankly, other Americans are haunted by those ghosts. They pine to unequivocally re-install the old ways. How many years did Jeffrey Epstein get away with operating a human trafficking operation, under the cover of a financial services company? For over 30 years. His clients were A-List males.

Epstein trafficked in adolescent females…

There are times when you just cannot step out of the way.