One Full Day

clipped from www.davidwarrenonline.com In other words, when someone announces that he is going to “speak truth to power,” it is invariably time to brace ourselves for a scintillating display of hypocrisy and narcissism. With the possible exception of Vaclav Havel (in his jailbird days, well before he became president of then-Czechoslovakia), people living under conditions of real oppression do not announce that they will speak truth to power. Alexander Solzhenitsyn once famously said, back when the Soviet Union existed, that if everyone in Russia would wake up one morning and agree to speak only the truth for one full day, the entire Communist system would collapse. Something like that actually happened, on the 9th of November 1989, but the point of Solzhenitsyn’s remark would be lost, did we not also inwardly understand, that no one can tell the truth all day. It is just too difficult. To begin with, it requires intelligence and courage. Both, working in mutual support.