To be silent, or not

This morning brought unsettling news.

The Court of Appeals in the Philippines upheld the conviction for Nobel laureate Maria Ressa and her former colleague at Rappler, Rey Santos Jr., all but ensuring she could see as many as 100 years in prison on charges of criminal cyber libel.

You read that right: if convicted on all counts from seven different cases being lodged against her, the cumulative sentences would keep her in jail for up to 100 years for the crime of publishing what the government decided they didn’t want published.

An American citizen, a former CNN journalist, a citizen who believes in a democratic Philippines, jailed for reporting the truth.

Three years ago, I had the privilege to get to know Maria over the course of a few days for L.A. Press Freedom Week, a series of events hosted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and partners. Looking back on it, it was a whirlwind of a week, a lot of it now forgotten as the past few years have brought their own winds.

I recall one-on-one conversations in a rideshare to The Los Angeles Times, conversations over a breakfast or a burger, about what kept Maria awake at night–the fear that what’s currently underway could ever happen, the worries over disinformation and its power to manipulate entire societies, and a phrase Maria has used more than once that’s stuck with me ever since: “I am your dystopic future.”

Those conversations were powerful for me. They shaped my dedication and passion for the importance of free speech–a passion I already held in theory but one that became that much more real in meeting someone living through it in a way I could only imagine.

While the exact words themselves escape me, what I haven’t forgotten were two things: Maria’s genuine kindness and Maria’s curiosity about anyone else she was speaking with, including me–the curiosity you only find in a true journalist whose life’s mission is, very simply, asking questions.

It’s somehow no surprise–and also that much more surprising–that authorities would go after someone so obviously genuine, and it puts the absurdity, and with it the cruelty, of their authoritarianism on display for the entire world to see.

I think it’s important, that all said, to sit for a moment with that thought: what is and isn’t a “surprise” these days.

Sitting across from Maria sharing lunch to a nice Pacific breeze, the image of her languishing in a prison seemed and seems unreal to me. No, not her. They would never do that to her.

Logically, I could wrap my head around it: anyone paying the slightest bit of attention has been witness to the cruelty of humanity these past few years, or to any student of history, the cruelty of humanity, period, but I have to confess something I don’t want to confess, which is that it was much easier to believe that everything would be alright instead. After all, here we were in sunny SoCal, where it never rains.

To me, what it boils down to is this: the world is facing a serious crisis of not knowing how to respond to fear and suffering.

As theologian Stanley Hauerwas has written, and I’ve quoted numerous times, “None of us willingly seeks to enter into the loneliness of others. We fear such loneliness may result in loss of control of our own life.” And with so much to fear and suffer, the best way to retain that control rests in the age-old choice of fight or flight.

Too many of us, even those of us with good intentions who listen and hear and try to understand, are prone to choose “flight” the moment reality gets too uncomfortably close, and that manifests in different ways for different people: as avoidance and disbelief, as a willingness to accept or share mis- or disinformation, as a desire to seek out the pleasure-response to replace the pain.

So, too, powerful players, knowing we’ll seek out what we want over what we need, use this to their advantage, conditioning us into willful silence.

Looking back, I think what impresses on me most about Maria Ressa, and what makes her profoundly worthy of the Nobel prize is that she sees the world choosing “flight” all around her, and it’s so crystal-clear to her what’s happening, so much so that even though her voice stands out as prophetic to the rest of us here–in promising that her struggle, there, is coming our way soon–she nevertheless refuses the choice of “flight” with the rest of the flock.

Instead she fights. Instead she chooses to #HoldTheLine. And she does so fully aware and comprehending what it could cost her but believing that sacrifice will matter in the end. Personally, I know of no other greater good than that.

We have to ask ourselves, then, are we willing or able to heed her warning with the same fervency she carries? Will we find within ourselves some moral imperative not only to make similar choices but also to coax those we know and love to join us in the harder path–to be more vocal now than you’ve ever been before, lest you and I and the rest of us taking our position of privilege for granted one day find ourselves silenced for the sake of our survival or silenced for the sake of their supremacy?

We’re going to find out sooner or later.