Chasing Wile E. Coyote and Finding My Voice
I’ve listened to and read so many great authors during the past two years, pandemic times and politics coming together to make me a great media consumer. It is now time to find my voice, and raise it. To decide and say what I think, not just to share great content. I got a head start on this recently thanks to a guest post I made on Greg Olear’s PREVAIL Substack. Over Thanksgiving I felt so many thoughts that had been swirling in my head come together and I took the time to write From Emmett Till to Kyle Rittenhouse—American History Echoes to this Day and Greg graciously posted it.
That post was a magnum opus, the kind of branchild that comes once every few months or years, if I am lucky! The posts here most often be much shorter, but I am very happy to be able to share this significant piece with you as I launch the Democracy OTL newsletter.
I have written a lot over the years, blogs, several books, a PhD thesis, but it is always a bit of a challenge to find my voice. My background is in science, education and research, so I naturally feel like I need a reference, a link, a fact to back up what I am saying. Listening to the great opinion podcasters over the past couple of years has led me to realize that I can also just say what I think! Everyone is entitled to my opinion, as they say.
I don’t really like sharing personal details of my life, but I have learned that seeing what we see, spaking up, sharing what we have learned, is really important. In my work as a documentary film executive producer I have learned that for racism to persist, white people have to remain silent and ignorant about a lot of things we should be speaking out about. This is true in my child abuse prevention work too. Abuse happens and is perpeuated when people know that something is going on but they just don’t know what it is, when they don’t feel empowered to raise concerns or even talk about it.
I used to joke that my memoir would be called “Things I Would Never Tell You,” but now I think I would call it “Chasing Wile E. Coyote.” With a hat tip to the great Lincoln’s Bible, she said that when you are learning about spies and mobsters, you can’t always see them directly but you can see the hole they leave, like Wile E. Coyote going through a wall, and that helps you figure out what is really going on:
Without going into too many details, I have realized recently (at age 53!) just how powerfully my upbringing silenced me. It silenced me through silence, which is actually pretty confusing. I was specifically told to never talk about money, religion or politics in polite society. It didn’t even need to be said not to talk about sex, or family secrets. This was modeled by everyone around me for so many years that even when things did open up, this Wile E. Coyote-shaped hole still exerts a powerful influece on my life. Even as I teach child safety workshops and help raise the next generation to know that “problems should not be secrets,” it does not really feel safe for me to talk about some of the problems that were hiding in plain sight for years.
This newsletter is not about those specific issues but it is about breaking through the silencing process, no matter how long it has gone on. We must not let that cone of silence limit us when it is time to take an honest look at what is going on in our nation right now, speak up, and act. I see you, Wile E. Coyote, and I am determined that you will not hold me back any longer.