They cut vocal cords, don’t they?
Reflections by Laurent Leduc - 8 March 2022, original to the Toronto Moon.
Yesterday, when I heard about the silencing of Tamara Lich, I didn’t need to sit down and cry. I was already sitting. So I just cried.
I had written about the need to speak only a few months ago. Then I quoted John Jay Chapman.
“Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose … Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don’t be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.”
Chapman seemed to have missed something: viz., be silenced by court order. Is this an improvement from prison? Is this more free than being in a jail cell? At least in a jail cell you could write and bring to the world such great works like Letters and Papers from Prison.
In Bonhoeffer’s day, that was how you communicated. You would write on paper with pen or pencil. In prison he could share his thoughts and those thoughts made a difference.
Similarly, Henry David Thoreau wrote On the Duty of Civil Disobedience in the freedom of his prison cell. Yes, Thoreau thought of his incarceration as total freedom. Perhaps that was the inspiration for the lines “Freedom’s just another word for ‘nothing left to lose’”, in Janis Joplin’s song. Thoreau inspired Gandhi who had the freedom to read about civil disobedience in his South African prison cell.
I know very little about Tamara Lich. What stays with me from a few clips I saw during the Canadian Freedom Convoy in Ottawa was that she speaks little and thinks a lot. She is not one to either seek or enjoy the limelight. When finally arrested she quipped something about looking forward to three square meals a day and getting some quiet sleep. A practical woman, I thought, because this was something my mother would have said.
When I was a university teacher, I tried my best to establish conditions for student engagement through journaling, writing a brief weekly reflection paper and having the class form conversation groups. In the latter, I was particularly aware of those who spoke and those who didn’t. At the start of each conversation group, one person took a turn each week at being a process monitor. This was to observe group dynamics and it quickly became clear that each group had talkers who wouldn’t shut up and non-talkers who wouldn’t speak.
I was relieved ten years ago when Susan Cain published Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. That work helped us to recognize that there was an important difference between thinking fast and thinking slow, as Daniel Kahneman more recently clarified.
I suspect Tamara Lich is quiet; an astute observer and deep thinker with the depth of thinking guided by feelings which in turn are perhaps guided by insights, dreams, and visions. Since I have nothing else on which to base my suspicions, let’s just call it a conspiracy theory and be done with it.
We hear a lot about conspiracy theories these days so it seems a bit odd to come to Tamara Lich’s defence by suggesting that she’s a conspiracy theory in and off herself. Please note I’m not saying she’s a conspiracy theorist. That’s different but not inconsequential.
Science comes about by getting a weird idea that something over here is connected to something over there but that no one is talking about it. The scientist doesn’t know for sure that no one is talking about it; only that they haven’t heard it talked about. Richard Feynman is one such scientist who says, “first you guess...” at which point his class at Cornell breaks into peels of laughter. “Don’t laugh, don’t laugh,” he continues, “First you guess...”
I suspect Tamara Lich has a great deal to say and given that she used social media to say it, and that this way of saying it is no longer open to her, we need to think of ways to help her say it.
Conspiracy is made out to be a bad thing. It’s not. We’ve been fooled again! It’s when two or more spirits come together to act. When the community where I live holds a barn dance, we all conspire to bring it about. And we have a great celebration: a large wooden dance floor, live music, a blazing wood fire (in cold weather), and lucky potluck dinners.
To conspire literally means “to breathe together”. Somehow, we let that meaning drift away from us. Why do we allow such beautiful words to be hijacked? It’s time to reclaim it.
Conspiracy is a good thing. Can we think of ways to work with her to convey her thoughts to the world?
We don’t need to be truckers to convey ideas. Let us, as communicators and educators, continue the convoy. We’ll have ourselves a convoy of ideas. A convoy of conveyance.
Dr. Laurent J. Leduc holds a PhD in Systematic Theology and retired as a professor from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto.