The Dangerous Art of Speaking Honestly
The truth was never safe. But it was always necessary.
There are so many things to write about. Still, the discomforting feeling circulating through the salon, the digital, and the physical alike is that your voice is becoming a dangerous tool. Words once felt like instruments of democracy; now they feel like contraband.
I sit with that.
I reflect on my thoughts and consider the battle over healthcare that has shut down the government, a fight being narratively mishandled by a legacy press too eager to please its owners and too frightened to offend its algorithms. Beneath the headlines are the stories that never make the crawl: Americans who will lose access to Medicaid and won’t be able to care for themselves or their ill children, parents choosing between groceries and prescriptions, and caregivers praying the system doesn’t forget them this month.
And while all this unfolds, raids continue in apartment homes, families separated in the name of “law and order.” The same old draconian brutality has returned, but dressed in the rhetoric of reform, masked as efficiency, defended as inevitability. It’s a cold calculus that measures human worth in political optics.
There is so much to discuss in America, but it is becoming increasingly more complicated to do so. That is the chill that overtakes the nation as we enter a treacherous fall and approach another winter of our national discontent.
I remember a time when Americans, both institutionally and personally, projected onto other nations, especially those in the so-called “developing world,” as if they were still fumbling toward their small-l liberal bearings, still battling the ghosts of illiberalism that we, the enlightened, had already exorcised. But those same wraiths have never left us. They’ve merely changed their costumes. They swirl now around our own nation, like dementors following the Hogwarts Express, feeding on our divisions and our illusions of exceptionalism.
We used to believe that we possessed a uniquely American patronus charm, some moral magic that could ward off our darker impulses. But the light beaming from our wands was dimmer than we believed it to be. It turned out the legacies of Jim Crow, Indigenous displacement, and identitarian extremism were not shadows behind us. Instead, they were still baked into the soil, whispering through every institution that claimed to have moved on.
It’s a sad state for any nation when its citizens feel unease about writing about it honestly. But honesty, as I’ve come to learn, is the truest form of love. It can be a painful process, scraping away myth until only the sinew of truth remains.
However, it is the only process that enables genuine growth.
As the world grows more competitive on emerging frontiers, from artificial intelligence to energy independence to climate resilience, America cannot afford to become inward and brittle. It must rediscover its capacity for self-criticism, humility, and openness to the lessons of others.
That was the cynical yet necessary calculus behind the civil rights reforms of the mid-twentieth century. While America proclaimed moral superiority to its Soviet counterparts, it could not do so convincingly while hosting segregated lunchrooms and denying Black citizens the vote. In the end, geopolitics forced morality’s hand. We wanted to look like freedom, so we had to approximate it.
Now, the stage is set once again. Our democracy’s vitality depends on our ability to understand the nation in both its enduring goodness and its perpetually haunting darkness. To speak of one without the other is to lie to ourselves and to the world.
If we lose our ability to speak truthfully about who we are, we lose the democratic impulse itself. We lose the moral muscle required for civic imagination, for empathy, and for progress.
That’s the danger of this moment.
That’s the quiet fear rippling through the nation’s salons and classrooms, its newsrooms and living rooms alike. Not that we have too much free speech, but that we are slowly forgetting what it’s for.
And that’s just how I’m feeling on this Monday.
