Posting has been slow lately because I’ve been sick

While I was laid up, I had a lot of time to think about the last few months of posting, the last few weeks especially, and about what kind of post I should make as a response or rebuttal to some recent criticisms.

Now, it’s not that these criticisms bother me. But they do distract and detract from the truth.

Some people have blurred the lines of their judgment so much that their entire sense of identity has become entangled with the people placed in charge of stewarding their community.

The happiness and beauty of where they live has become so deeply tied to how they perceive that place, they lose the ability to hold it accountable.

It’s a backwards and confusing reality they’re trying to hold onto, one that builds a long-term cognitive dissonance that’s blatantly irrational. In that mindset, any criticism of this public official, or that first responder, or this law, or that ridiculous statute, becomes intolerable.

Any criticism of jobs left undone, poor work, failing infrastructure, or anything else becomes distasteful to their palate.

Why?

Because questioning any part of that worldview forces them to question the entire identity they’ve accepted within it. Because when you’re conditioned to accept less long enough, some will grudgingly leave that condition even if it is for something better.

It’s alright to leave the gaslighting. Just enough has never been and never will be enough.

This brings me to tomorrow’s podcast topic. It is our first podcast, and rather than finish out any article series, for this first one I wanted to lay out part of our ethos with Whisper Networks LLC.

Liberty and freedom and what it actually means. What it means in terms of your town, your officials, your life, and your responsibility to it.

There is no such thing as free freedom. It doesn’t come shrink-wrapped in slogans or handed down from on high. The blessings we talk about – speech, movement, self-determination, the right to question, to expose, to build something better, all of it comes with weight.

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”

— Thomas Paine

Paine’s telling us outright: You want to live free? Then prepare to sweat for it. Supporting freedom isn’t about waving a flag when it’s convenient or quoting the Constitution when it suits your argument. It’s about holding the line when it would be easier to look away. It’s about showing up – tired, sick, outnumbered, unheard and still doing the work of watchdog, whistleblower, neighbor, builder, thorn-in-the-side.

Consider this: We went to war over tea and taxes, the idea that some far-off crown could dip into our pockets without so much as a say lit the match that built a country. And now? We’ve got taxes layered like sediment: federal, state, county, city, utility, rainwater runoff, cell phone surcharges, we get nickel-and-dimed so hard we don’t even flinch anymore. We fund the roads that don’t get fixed, the departments that don’t respond, the officials that barely show up and we thank them with yard signs and holiday parades.

So tell me again why “town pride” means keeping quiet when things are broken? Pride isn’t pretending everything’s fine, it’s having the guts to fix what isn’t. If your love for a place makes you defend dysfunction, that’s not pride. That’s denial dressed up in hometown colors.

This is why Whisper Networks LLC exists, to bring accountability even when it’s uncomfortable.

Whisper One Out.