“Who Rules the World 2” as I call him, just graduated from high school – he who, at age 3, played in the sand pile with his 5-year-old brother, burying the Power Rangers and the R2D2s.

Later, lying in the hammock, his brother raised the question “Who rules the world?” I asked him who he thought ruled the world. “Kings and queens and presidents and the news,” he said.

As Who Rules the World 2 graduates, in the age of the Jan. 6 insurrection, the Big Lie about the legally chosen president and Fox News declining to broadcast the hearings of the Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, one wonders how “the truth” will fare now as the real ruler of the world.

Hiding the truth is a hallmark of totalitarian regimes. “No Enemies, No Hatred,” Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo’s collection of essays on the Tianamen Square massacre and government oppression, clarifies the commitment of the Chinese military to distort the identities of those murdered. “Immediately after the massacre in Beijing on June 4, 1989, Chinese authorities exploited their monopoly of the mass media in order to blur the difference between black and white. They constantly repeated how cruelly so-called thugs had treated the martial law troops, and tried their best to hide the truth about how the troops had wantonly slaughtered ordinary people. Liu clarifies that many of those gunned down that day were passing by or trying to assist the wounded.

The risks he took in speaking the truth were substantial. He was convicted for “incitement to subvert state power” for writing an essay called “June 2nd Hunger Strike Declaration.” Telling the truth is never without consequence. Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to 11 years in prison by the Chinese government for writing essays about the truth of that day. “I hope I will be the last victim of China’s long record of treating words as crimes.”

If words are used to tell the truth and not treated as crimes, then there is hope that truth will come forth. The hopes of sustaining democracy now, it seems, rest on the disclosure of exactly what the truth is about Jan 6, 2021.

High government appointees knew the truth and chose not to correct distortions of what happened on Jan 6 presented by those members of Congress and the Trump administration who denied it was a violent insurrection. The U.S. Attorney General, William Barr; the chief of staff of the president of the United States, Mark Meadows; attorney John Eastman; adviser Rudy Giuliani; adviser Jason Miller, now under subpeona, only now tell the truth.

One has to wonder if they feared severe consequence for disclosing the truth, thus opting to remain silent unless subpoenaed, and who they feared would be the perpetrator of those consequences.

If the Truth does not rule the world, if it’s not the moral underpinning of the law of this land, if the Truth doesn’t rule the world, how will anybody’s reality ever by acknowledged? We won’t be able “to hold these truths to be self-evident” anymore- the moral core of this democracy, and after all is said and done, why who rules the world matters. Fifteen years ago, a five year old knew this is an important question to ask . We’ve got to hope that every high school graduate still thinks it’s a question worth asking and still feels qualified to search for the answer.

— Special to the Telegram