Before the Silence Does More Damage

A letter about courage, fear, and the responsibility to tell the truth

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

To all those who keep waiting for the grown-ups in the room. (I’m beginning to worry they’re waiting for us):

So, let me ask if this has happened to you lately: I’m scrolling social media and I see a clip that looks mildly interesting, maybe provocative. But before I’ve decided whether I want to watch it, I get a sick feeling in my stomach.

Do you know what I’m talking about? Before I’m recovered from my shock/despair, I start talking myself down, because I realize I can’t live with these permanently elevated cortisol levels. Surely I misheard, and I’m missing some important context. I mean, it can’t be as bad as it looked, right? Because if it were, somebody would do something, and no one is, so it must not be?

It’s almost a reflex now. What else can we do? It feels like a struggle not to curl up into the fetal position, slam your eyelids shut, and jam your fingers in your ears. You can’t walk around with your heart in your throat for long, so you learn to catch the dread as it’s getting up a head of steam. Carefully, you set your discomfort down on the coffee table, where everything seems to collect. Then, you go back into the kitchen and start doing the dishes. Basic mental health survival.

But I’m tired of curling up or walking away. So, since it’s just us, I’ll just say it: “I’m afraid.”

I’m afraid in the way you’re afraid when somebody you love is driving, and you can see what they can’t, and you’ve already said “careful here” twice. And you’re clutching the door handle like grim death. That kind of afraid.

But what I refuse to do, tempting as it is, is offer a medical diagnosis. I’m not a doctor (well, not the kind that can prescribe medicine, anyway), and neither are most of the people typing the word “dementia” in relationship to the president this week.

Here’s what I can’t do: I’m not going to shame anyone with issues of aging and the heartache that can be associated with it. I’ve sat with too many families in that particular grief to use it flippantly, like an insult.

Whatever’s happening to the man isn’t really what I’m focused on, anyway. There’s a version of this where we use up all the oxygen in the atmosphere fighting over a word none of us are professionally qualified to use. We fight over a medical diagnosis, without ever looking at the harder thing, which isn’t about him at all.

See, because the danger isn’t age, disability, verbal slips, or even one man’s erratic and addled personality. The danger is a system of people with power deciding that their jobs, access, party loyalty, and proximity to power matter more than public safety.

What’s really frightening to me is that we all seem to have stopped seeing what’s plain to just about anyone with a lick of sense.

He called Iran the “Islamic Republic of Japan,” on camera, in the same breath as ordering forces to strike it. At first, I did what people often do: dismissed it as a slip. Anyone can fumble a name. No big deal.

But then he called Zelensky “President Putin.” For clarity’s sake: the president identified the man defending his country as the man invading it. Zelensky’s not a name you mistake for “Putin.” But even so, I did the whole mental gymnastics thing anyway.

Then came the order to cut off all trade with Spain, over something Spain hadn’t done: “Cut off all trade with Spain, please, including visits.” And the thing is, even the president doesn’t get to make that kind of decree. As it happens, Spain’s trade runs through the European Union and not through one man’s febrile temper tantrum.

And the whole thing was just weird and disconcerting. I know of no “long day” that explains the mental workings of a man untethered in many respects from how the world works, especially if it’s a man whose whims can move fleets and launch missiles.

Shouldn’t somebody be doing something? I’ve been quietly anguishing over the possibility that no one is, because every last one of us, the aides and generals and senators and you and me—we’re all running the same maneuver, excusing whatever this is.

It’s easy to get lulled into complacency. A country can coast a long way on watching a slow-motion train wreck. Right up until it can’t.

We have constitutional tools for moments when power becomes dangerous, and we have civic tools for moments when constitutional courage fails. There are political levers to pull, but the people who should be pulling them are looking at the tops of their shoes. It feels like there’s been a nationwide conspiracy of silence. Like, we’re all watching the same horror movie, certain that there’s surely a grown-up somewhere who’s going to step in before Armageddon launches.

There’s a passage that feels germane to our current struggles. God tells Ezekiel:

“I’ve made you a sentinel, a watchman on the wall. If you see the sword coming and keep quiet, when the people are taken, their blood will be on your hands. But if you blow the trumpet, and the people don’t take cover, well then, their blood is on their own heads, and you’ve saved your life.”

Notice what the sentinel is never promised. God never says that the city will listen, or that the sword will be magically turned back. Ezekiel is given one thing that’s his. He’s got one tiny bit of agency: He gets to make the choice about whether the horn gets blown.

The passage never says Ezekiel’s the most qualified person available, only that he’s the one who can see it and decide how to respond.

All these years later, I’ve seen it. So have you.

So this is me trying to make a faithful choice and speak up.

Here’s the part I find difficult to write. Some of you, whom I love, are still trying to decide if you should say something. Is it the right time yet? “I don’t want to be an alarmist. I also don’t want to draw any more attention to myself than is absolutely necessary.”

It would be pretty presumptuous of me to call you blind, given that I’ve spent a lot of time perfecting the not-really-seeing-what’s-going-on-in-front-of-my-own-face thing, and I’m not fully clear of it yet. The maneuver to rationalize unjust and inequitable behavior/policy isn’t merely stupidity or malice. It’s how a frightened person keeps a little solid ground in sight.

But I’m asking you to stop, just for the duration of this letter, and let all that dread float to the surface of your consciousness. Not for my sake. But only because some things can’t be put back together once they’re broken.

I don’t know whether the city will hear Ezekiel’s horn. That was never the watchman’s to know.

But I do know this: once you’ve seen the sword, pretending not to see it becomes its own kind of execrable complicity.

So this is me blowing the horn, because silence has started to feel less like caution and more like consent. Not because I’m brave enough or certain enough. And it’s certainly not because I think one letter can stop whatever’s coming.

But I’m asking you, gently but plainly, to stop waiting for someone else to be the grown-up in the room. The grown-up in the room may have to be you, whose greatest claim to the vocation of adulthood is just being the one person who refuses to shrug, while everybody else is studiously avoiding eye contact.

Maybe the city listens. Maybe it doesn’t. But the faithful task was never to guarantee the outcome. We don’t say this stuff because saying it “works.” We say it because it’s the right thing to do.

The faithful task is to tell the truth before the silence does more damage than any trumpet can undo.

Be gentle and brave,

Derek