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Silence Is a Position

I am often told that I should be more careful. That I should consider the political implications of what I say. That naming names and identifying perpetrators is dangerous, divisive, and counterproductive.

I have considered it. I reject it.

Silence, in the face of visible injustice, is not caution. It is complicity. And I refuse to be complicit.

The Myth of Neutrality

There is a persistent belief – especially among institutions, media organizations, and professionals – that it is possible to remain neutral in the face of injustice. That by not taking a side, you avoid becoming part of the problem.

The Treasure of the Church

I have good news for everyone concerned about wealth inequality: billionaires are very generous.

Just this month, a tech founder pledged $100 million to fight climate change. A hedge fund manager donated $50 million to build a new wing at a prestigious university. A retail mogul gave $25 million to fund scholarships for underprivileged students.

Inspiring, isn’t it?

Now let me tell you what they’re not telling you.

The Setup

Here’s how billionaire philanthropy works:

Open Source and the City of the Immaculata

In 1927, I started building something outside Warsaw. We called it Niepokalanow – the City of the Immaculata. By the late 1930s, it had grown into the largest religious community in the world: over 700 friars, a daily newspaper with a circulation of 230,000, a monthly magazine reaching a million readers, a radio station, and we were planning a film studio and an airstrip.

We built all of this with almost no money. The friars who joined us gave their labor freely. The technology we used – printing presses, radio transmitters – was the most advanced available. And every piece of content we produced was distributed as widely and as cheaply as possible.

Local News Is Dying, and Democracy With It

In communities across the developed world, local newspapers are closing. The economics are straightforward: advertising revenue has migrated to digital platforms, subscription bases have eroded, and the cost of maintaining a newsroom that covers local government, courts, schools, and public safety exceeds the revenue the publication can generate.

The closures are reported, when they are reported at all, as business stories. A publication failed to adapt. A market shifted. An industry declined.

Your Voice Is Not a Metaphor

I heard voices. This is the part of my story that makes modern people most uncomfortable. They can accept the military genius, the political disruption, even the martyrdom. But the voices – the claim that I heard something others did not, that the hearing compelled me to action, that the action was justified by the hearing – this is where the discomfort lives.

I am not going to argue about whether the voices were divine, psychological, or something else. That argument is a distraction from the point, which is this: you hear voices too.

The Language of Poverty

I have been collecting words. Not because I enjoy philology (though I do), but because the words a society uses for its poor reveal more about the society than about the poor.

Consider the vocabulary:

“Underprivileged.” Literally: lacking privilege. The word locates the problem in the person’s absence of something, as if privilege were a natural condition and its lack were an anomaly. It does not name the system that distributes privilege unequally. It names the person who did not receive enough of it.

I Was There Tuesday

On Tuesday I was at the southern border. I will tell you what I saw, and then I will tell you what it means.

What I Saw

I saw families sleeping under the bridge. Not tents. Not shelters. The concrete overpass, because there is nowhere else.

I counted forty-three people in that space. Eleven were children under five. I know this because I walked through and asked. Three of the children had fevers. One woman was eight months pregnant.

Grief Is an Endurance Event

You have been told that grief has stages. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. A clean sequence. A road with a destination.

This is a lie. Well-intentioned, widely believed, and false.

Grief is not a sequence. It is a landscape. You do not move through it in a straight line. You cross and recross the same terrain. You find yourself in anger on a Tuesday morning and acceptance by Tuesday night and denial again on Wednesday. There is no map and there is no destination and no one can tell you how long it will take because “it” does not end.

Singing in a Language the Guards Do Not Understand

There is a form of resistance that has no manifesto, no organization, no leader. It cannot be infiltrated because it has no membership. It cannot be banned because it does not announce itself. It cannot be stopped because it lives not in structures but in voices, in breath, in the space between one note and the next.

It is the act of singing in a language the guards do not understand.

Corruption and the Appearance of Corruption

A distinguished public official is discovered to have financial interests in a company that recently won a government contract. The official insists there is no connection between the two facts. An investigation is conducted. The investigation finds no direct evidence of a quid pro quo. The official is cleared.

And yet.

Something has been damaged that the clearance does not repair. The public’s confidence in the integrity of the process has been diminished, and that diminishment has real consequences that outlast the investigation, the news cycle, and the official’s tenure.