(click here and play this song while reading this)
Karen Silkwood was a courageous young woman who spoke with federal investigators shortly before she died under the most mysterious of circumstances. I am thinking about Karen tonight, along with the ghosts of all the other hundreds of whistleblowers and principled patriots who had the courage to stand up and speak out over the short history of this crumbling nation.
Our nation, and in fact the entire world, has a very poor history when it comes to our treatment of those rare and honorable few who step knowingly into danger, driven not by money or by expectation, but who speak up and stand out because their moral and ethical compass tells them they must. But a universal history will be written and their place in that history will transcend this flicker in time that is nothing more than a brief and transient triumph of evil.
The whistleblower is the unsung canary in the coal mine and in the very large cases, the coalmine is an entire nation. These canaries protect not just few. Not just thousands, but hundreds of thousands. And in this damaged world that we live in today, these canaries protect millions.
I invite each of you to stop for a moment, slow down all your thinking. Breathe deeply for many long moments and fully engage all of your cognitive abilities. Call upon not just your head, but your heart and your soul and your intuition. Think with your blood and with your ears and with your eyes and your fingers. When you do stop to consider this world around you, are you not overwhelmed by the deepest sense of dread? Are you not overcome with a terrible foreboding for what the future holds? I know that I certainly am.
Granted, I see much more than most….I spend an average of 10 hours a day immersed in a Dante-like descent into a hell that is inescapable for those clients who entrust their souls to me as we descend together. At the end of the day, if only for a few hours, I surface from this hell, knowing however that the day will begin again and that I will go down once again….but while I may surface, for too many millions of those around us, they stay trapped in this hell….every day. Every night. The world that they have delivered unto us is a hell that too many of those that walked among us will not escape.
And yet there are those that said to all of us, “Although I am a stranger, I will hold your hand and I will travel with you.” And while you are overwhelmed with gratitude, she respond simply, “Do not thank me, for this is what I must do.” And that is indeed what they have done. There was a star, a light. A higher calling that drew them into this service. And while the darkness abounds all around in this moment in time, they know that today is just an instantaneous flicker of time in a universe that knows no time. Those selfless servants of good will forever be bathed in a light that is goodness and truth and integrity.
There will come a day, and this day will unfortunately come too soon, when we will all be forced to confront our own failings and inaction. We all did not nearly enough. We all sat aside and watched while one by one, the herd was thinned out. We were numbed by the perilous comfort of the razor’s edge. And while that comfort provided a delusion of security, a fiction of a reality that did not exist, the truth and the light are a force that, while diminished in this most dangerous time, will eventually shine through.
It certainly is dark right now. For all of us. But we do not know when the dawn will come. What I know for certain is that in this world, I have experienced the loving, white light that is grace and truth and light.
In this world, there are still those that will stand tall and show us all what courage and fight really means. They are fools to make war on our Sisters in Arms.
