It's not been a week since my last blog, and yet, the heart is so overwhelmed, it needs to write. My brother Jason encouraged me earlier this year that I should write more as creativity is what we all need in this moment.

Again, as I've stated, by no means is this blog political. I have always wished to protray in my social media and internet sphere as a person of faith, of living in another culture I wasn't raised in, an academic and a busineswoman, not always in that particular order.

But its too heavy.

A woman made a decision and a man made a decision. Her's did not appear to threaten life, his took hers and he called her out with the worst slur for a man to call a woman in the English language.

And worse yet, becuase everywhere, men demean and degrade women they feel they most impose their power upon, he was defended, whisked away to an unknown location. And we may never see any sense of justice or truth, instead we see coverup and lies.

Many on social media this week have quoted bits and pieces from the book, 1984, that somehow most of us English speakers were obliged to read in high school, honestly before we could really understand what it was discussing.

I somehow skipped that memo, and even though I'm an avid reader (returning to more this year) I somehow managed to not read 1984 and other dystopian books until 2018.

I was putting together my business and watching the world turn faster and faster. I thought maybe somehow I could finish my PhD, and through a friend, it might turn into a different path, literature and at that, dystopia. So I bought all the books and read them.

Reading 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell even in 2018 was like reading a newspaper from that same day. Trump was smack in the middle of his first term and as they walked through those first tenative moments of finding power, and placing various judges into the supreme court, I read thos books and threw them against the wall again and again and again.

And 2020 happened. And we lived a dystopia that we haven't lived before as an entire world. My friend who is a literature professor specializing in such books struggled even more than we all did. I felt his echoes of pain.

And after almost an entire year of change and violence and pain and suffering, this last week occurs. And the world has erupted with screaming on both sides, and its so painful.

But from a personal level, what has bothered me more than anything, is the untruth and the lies. You see, for me, the worst sin, or falling short of who God has made us to be, is when we completely deny the truth and lie.

We lie to protect ourselves

Our families

Our communities

And sometimes a little white lie, Oh your new haircut is great! Yes, the check is in the mail (but we don't do that anymore do we?") or something to the sort, makes life a little easier.

But this.

The complete denial of truth and retelling of the story to protect an agenda.

This is pure evil. 

George Orwell said a lot in 1984, but today, these words ring out loudly. So, I'm saying them loud. As the protagonist is being tortured at the hands of those who control all, the monologue goes forth..

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.

Don't let them win folks. Speak the truth. Say it loud. Don't let them take control and become more and more powerful. Light shines in the darkness. Shine it loud.