The Revolution Might, In Fact, Be Televised

Whatever form the resistance takes - it must be honest at its core. We genuine artists and creatives can handle that.

Our leaders are liars.

This is an important starting point for greeting the current moment in which we find ourselves. Not only are those with the most power actively harming and oppressing and frightening us — they also have the gall to lie about it to our faces.

We’ve seen numerous examples of this recently. One especially troubling instance came after the murder of Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis mom and poet who died after being shot at point-blank range by Jonathan Ross, an agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while trying to depart from an ICE checkpoint.

During a press conference about the murder, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told the nation that Good was attempting to harm ICE agents, labeling her acts as “domestic terrorism.” President Donald Trump also posted on Truth Social that Good was “obviously a professional agitator” as well as “disorderly, obstructing and resisting” ICE agents, reinforcing the narrative that her shooting was self-defense.

None of what they said is true. We know this because there were numerous videos of the incident, taken from various angles, that negated what our leaders told us. They knew these videos existed, and peddled their false narrative all the same.

They lied to us. About a murder committed under their watch. Without consequence.

Which is why a critical component of our resistance, now, must be to name things for what they are. In the wake of nurse Alex Pretti’s brutal death — another grisly murder, also in Minneapolis, also documented from numerous angles, also committed by armed agents in federal employ, also lied about by those on high, so egregiously that his own family condemned the falsehoods in a statement — EMS Chief Rachel Sayre offered this insight to reporters about what she witnessed for herself:

“My background is in international humanitarian response in conflict zones in Yemen, Haiti, Syria, Iraq and Ukraine. What I’ve seen here is what I’ve seen there — a powerful entity violently and intentionally terrorizing people.”

Her boldness and bravery in stating plainly what she knows to be true — and who is truly at fault — is exactly what the moment calls for.

So is Mon Mothma’s.

(“Andor” spoilers to follow.) Who is that, some may ask? For those uninitiated to the Star Wars universe — or at least, to “Andor,” a 2-season television show that is among the most thoughtfully crafted and eerily relevant works of this decade — the character Mon Mothma is a member of the fictional Galactic Senate who finds herself at odds with fascistic leader Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, and the increasing number of sycophants who align with him. (The man later becomes Sith Lord Darth Sidious, so, y’know… she was on to something.)

Toward the climax of the show’s brief run, Mothma makes an impassioned plea to her fellow politicians, at great personal risk. The crux of her message: “The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.”

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Here’s the thing…

Art is love, and catharsis, and connection. Art is beauty, and joy, and pain. Art can be a balm, a distraction, a lift … and, it can be an instrument.

It can be a medium of total truth, when it is made with care, and opened eyes, and from places within us that are real. When it is made right. Music, film, television, the visual arts, dance, writing in all its many forms… all of it has the power to lay bare that which is hardest to look at, hardest to admit — but that which is true all the same.

In a time when the powerful suppress us to further their authoritarian, hateful agendas, not only through brute force and hypocritical policy, but through the bending of truth itself — something author George Orwell cautioned us again in his own creation, “1984,” in which he conceived of a governmental power that “told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears” as their “final, most essential command” to the public it controlled… anything that shines honest lights upon their wrongs, and illuminates a path toward what is true, and good, and just… is of deep value to us now.

There is much that we can do to resist. We can take to the streets in protest, and in protection of one another. We can share what we have with those in greater need than us — food, clothing, money, whatever we can spare. We can hold those in power — power given by us — accountable for their wrongdoing, or for their failures to act on our behalves. We can stand by one another, speak up for one another.

We can name liars for who and what they are. And, our truth-telling can take all forms.

One of our most critical responsibilities, as those who can and will resist this hostile takeover, is to tell those truths in all the ways we know how. For the love of one another, we must speak, shout, preach, write… sing, play, dance, conduct, paint, craft stories… lift up what is real, with whatever our bodies and minds permit us to do.

We artists, we creators… We are not tasked with making truth. We are tasked with telling truth through our making.

None of it is trivial; all of it is vital. All of it is power.

The monsters cannot take — or lie — that away from us.