My days go up and down. Vandals are destroying my beautiful city. Our statue to Cristobal Colon (Columbus) was thrown into a lake. If I’ve learned anything from history, it’s that allowing unruly crowds to wantonly destroy property, usually creates serious problems graver than the act of vandalism.

I’m being blamed for things that happened 401 years ago, as if I, or anyone else alive today, for that matter, can change things.

A billionaire Robert Johnson, owner of Black Entertainment Television (BET)wants the descendents of slaves to be paid fourteen trillion dollars in reparations for slavery.. This is an absurd amount of money. The National Debt is around $20 trillion and it has taken about 230 years to accumulate that.

One hundred years ago the victorious Allied Powers put the demand for reparations from Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, ending The Great War,1914-18. The reparations demand set off a destabilizing round of inflation in the Getman Weimar Republic, successor to Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Hohenzollern Dynasty. Ultimately, who benefitted were Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Remember him?

I have to give Mr Johnson money because BET is in my FIOS package. I do not watch BET, don’t care to watch BET, and can’t understand why I have to pay for a channel I don’t watch. So I’m trying to have it removed from my services.

To be fair, there is a lot of stuff on FIOS I don’t watch but have to pay for, same as you.

But why I have to enrich a billionaire whose solution to ameliorate the race issue is to destroy the dollar and the economy is beyond me.

A billionaire. Mind you.

Oh well. Go figure.

Human trafficking is a $125 billion industry. 100,000 children are trafficked each year. It is the modern version of the international slave trade. Grant you, there is no horrific Middle Passage, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t morally repugnant

The human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein socialized with high profile celebrities and politicians,like Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, even Donald Trump, before Trump severed all ties with him in the early 2000’s.. Epstein supported all the A List.politicians (mostly Democratic) and causes, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton. He was pro-choice. But then Jeffrey Epstein was last year’s outrage.We forget how the same politicians and celebrities who today are decrying exploitation and racism would readily have their pictures taken with Bill Clinton. Clinton looked the other way at Epstein’s criminality, if not actually and directly benefiting from it. One Degree of Seperation, Politician -Clinton-Epstein..

Human Traffickers used to be called ” white slavers”. There was a law called The Mann Act which made it a federal crime to transport a person across a state line for “immoral purposes”..Black Heavyweight Champion Jack Johnson was convicted in 1913 on a dubious charge of violating the Mann Act. He would be pardoned posthumously in the Twenty First Century, by President…..Donald Trump.

Human trafficking is a global industry; but not all of human trafficking involves sexual exploitation. Christian Filipino women are lured to the Muslim Middle East, where they are employed as domestic workers. Their “employers” hold their passports, in order to keep them in country and under their control. Involuntary servitude is the term for that practice.

Even The Catholic Church trafficked young men from Colombia to attend seminary in the USA, where they were groomed as sexual partners for gay members of the clergy.

This is all unseemly, disgusting, shocking and an outrage. And we haven’t even talked about exploitative sweat shops in the developing world and China. These shops do contract work for Nike, Apple, Amazon, and others. You know, the businesses that proclaim Black Lives Matter.

Tom Wolfe wrote two essays in the late sicties, early sevrnties, Radical Chic and Mau-mauing The Flak Catchers, about how affluent leftists latched on to political radicalism to embellish their reputations as “good people.” , similar to what we see todsy.

Some argue that theatre is a moribund art. Actually, it merely morphed into modern politics.

Remember, racism is wrong. Profiting from other modern forms of exploitation is OK, as long as one doesn’t get caught.

I received a letter from the Bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Richmond and at the head was shown my Constituent ID#. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Is that how The Most Holy Triune God thinks of my wife and me?

 “And the two shall become one flesh and one Constituent  ID#”.

Needless to say that little morsel of depersonalization was rather difficult to digest. This might partially explain why The Church is bleeding out members like a hog’s carcass at an abattoir. 

One day,, I might be able to return to Mass without social distancing restrictions, age restrictions or without entering a lottery to attend the Mass.

Pressing on.

I am back.

Leave it at that for right now. 

My depression isn’t getting any better. 

The light has gone out. My creativity has been impaired.

The ideologues have staged a figurative coup d’etat.

What happened in St Petersburg, Beijing, Pyongyang, Hanoi, Havana, and Caracas is happening here.

So I’m leaving the blogosphere. For good. My reflexive visits to Word Press are over. I know that I am not welcome anymore.

So I will leave you all to your puny, sour, and vindictive rants, your gaslighting, your exhortations to self-hatred.

Good Bye.

Tired.

Depressed.

Discouraged.

Suspicious.

Cynical.

They aren’t going away.

So I guess I will.

For a while anyway.

I have no answers.

Neither does anybody else.

Sleep-deprived

Lonely

An alien in my own land

Where thugs parade as heroes.

And reciprocity is amplified.

How can we be delivered from the demons when the tabernacless are locked?

Yet my voice will be heard

As Memorarae leaves my feeble throat.

J likes to drive around in her car, what my fellow male high school classmates used to do when were 16 or 17. Only thing is that J is 65.

We drove over to the other side of the river. The James River is an increasingly meaningless line of demarcation in Richmond. The wealth, and the poverty, are distributed fairly evenly. We drove through a neighbourhood that thirty or forty years ago was affluent. Now there are store vacancies and store closures. A mile east toward the older parts of the city, homes seem a little better kept, and renovated. Gentrification is perhaps at work, but the houses aren’t that much older. The occupancies on the main thoroughfares always seem to include a dialysis center, sometimes where a gas station used to be. Dialysis center, 7-Eleven, Starbucks. CVS, Walgreen’s (Duane Reed) are almost guaranteed to be on Any Street USA.

I get my heavy dose of culture shock from the drive around. Things are pretty diverse. We have trees, relative quiet, nice neighbours and rarely any gunfire, in my little corner of the metropolitan area. It is a blessing. That J likes to cruise around and I don’t is one of our differences. I’m glad she took me on the trip today. Kind of gave context to the term diversity

I got a text from my stepmother’s daughter-in-law, stating my strpmother is in the ER, waiting to be admitted. It was 3:00 AM. Finally she was put in a room at about 2:00 PM this afternoon. The staffing at hospitals has been decimated by consequences of no non-essential admissions during the pandemic.

She has some pulmonary effusion, related to congestive heart failure. She is 94, almost 95. We’re worried. She is a tough resilient woman, but she is getting increasingly frail, with two falls in recent weeks.

The COVID-19 precautions at the hospital make visits difficult.

We are hopeful she will make it through this episode.