Silence is betrayal

For the past couple of days, I’ve been writing about the Democratic Party’s mishandling of impeachment. My view is that, in committing an act of insurgency, it doesn’t make much strategic sense to convince people that you’re right by taking a moderate approach. More persuasive is going for broke and making a sweeping moral case that warrants all the pomp and circumstance. The counter-arguments would be the same regardless — it’s nothing more than a partisan war, it’s too divisive, being inappropriate isn’t illegal.

The false hope of moderation is the belief that silence is protection. What I mean by silence isn’t quiet, but selective speech derived from a spirit of fear. It allows us to conceal as much as we reveal. It allows for conditional virtue. Audre Lorde said that the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation. What we choose to give voice to is us telling ourselves and others who we are. The things that we choose to be silent about indicate a fear of our selves becoming visible. It’s true — visbility invites vulnerability. It’s easier for people to hold us accountable to and for things when they can see us. But the kind of exposure that comes from visibility is crucial because it means that we’re putting our allies and opponents on notice — “Here I am.” It means that we’re being clear both about the nature of our commitments and our willingness to put our lives on the line for them. It was an incredible missed opportunity for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to assemble an intentionally diverse group of House Impeachment Managers and then task them with presenting such a woefully whitewashed case for impeachment — one not about the abuse of power entailed in threatening the safety of their communities and constitutional protections or jeopardizing national security, but obtaining information about a political opponent from a foreign source. So, I would ask the “Party of Inclusion”:

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?

…

my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”