Some wasps paralyze caterpillars by stinging them, then injecting their eggs into the motionless caterpillar, who now serves as the wasp’s incubator.

Today, many good-hearted people have been “stung” by accusations (or the fear of accusations) that they are racist, transphobic or unpatriotic. They are paralyzed into silence. Some of them become incubators for things they don’t really believe, e.g., We must fight racism is by dividing people into “races” and segregating us from each other. E.g., One’s sex is something one feels, not something determined the type of gamete one’s body is designed to produce.E.g., Public health professionals asserting baseless COVID claims.

I’ve spoken to many of these paralyzed fearful people. They tell me that they remain silent because they are uncomfortable, worried about losing friends if they speak or worried about the financial repercussions of speaking out.

It might be that we have lived too well and for too long as a society, causing us to be of shape, intellectually flabby and afraid of being called names. We might need to endure much more difficult times before we are able to regroup and recalibrate. Consider the maxim:

Hard times create strong people.

Strong people create good times.

Good times create weak people.

Weak people create hard times.

Many people tell me that they “can’t” speak up, but “can’t” is mostly a state of mind. This reluctance to speak up doesn’t bode well for a country established upon the idea of individual liberties, a place where the citizens themselves must be in charge lest the tyrants take over.

This is a country founded on the idea that it is one’s duty to dissent for free speech to work. As Martin Luther King famously warned: “A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.”