A Disturbing Discussion

Logic is not a strong point of today’s society. Assessing statements and analyzing claims are difficult at the best of times. Now, with the suppression of information and outright lying by so many powerful people and entities, it is harder than ever to know what is true.

I joined my husband on one of his weekly podcasts which will air in the next few weeks. We interviewed author Dr. Naomi Wolf, something that we were eager to do after reading her book, Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and The War Against the Human. Dr. Wolf has authored a number of best-sellers over the past few decades, mostly books that I confess we never read. Her prominence as a feminist icon suggested that we would disagree more than agree.

Yet, she had come across my radar screen recently for courageous blogs she wrote that, I assumed, infuriated many of her friends, colleagues, and fans. One was an apology to conservatives for accepting lies that she had been told about them. Then she stepped over a red line. While several leaders on the left side of the aisle have claimed, “I’m still a liberal, but I am not woke,” she took this a step further. She attended an event where Donald Trump spoke and after listening to him and investigating some of what he was purported to have said and done, she questioned whether what she thought she knew about him was accurate, including his allegedly most egregious statements.

Her most recent book focused on how governments around the world acted during the covid years. Her assessment for why they behaved as they did is frightening and ominous. Although we ran overtime in our interview with Naomi, we still didn’t get to all the questions we had prepared. We plan to look into some of the things that she said. But, if things are only 50% as bad as she claims, we are in for some rough times ahead.

We, like everyone we know, are busy. We have a marriage and family to nurture, work to do, a religious life and community with its obligations, friendships that need maintenance, and a to-do list that only grows in one direction.

It is impossible to prove a negative. Imagine me insisting that if each reader of this Musing sends me $1,000, there will be no riot tonight on the streets of Chicago, and then there is no riot, you can’t prove that those donations had no effect. Throughout history, there have been periods —remember Y2K—when threats that panicked people and led to grand reactions, did not happen. On the other hand, there were warnings that were not heeded. By the time the problem was evident, it was too late—remember Winston Churchill and World War 2.

Which phase of history are we in now? I tend to think the latter. I believe that the United States is teetering on the edge of losing its identity as a Constitutional Republic. What each of us can, should, and must do is not easy to see.

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