More Scary Honesty For America

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Bill, there are lots of things going on politically in our country with another round of Democratic debates. It feels like unprecedented attacks by the President through Twitter to different people in Congress. Even in-fighting in Congress among the Democrats, whether should they start impeachment proceeding or not, it’s a good time to revisit the concept of scary honesty. There’s a lot of material that seems to relate to what is going on right now.

Scary honesty is such a wonderful concept to see after. It’s an adult narrative. It’s a very mature narrative of, “We need to do some honesty about this.” We’ve got to watch out before the counter-narrative not to sound so much like it’s a power over narrative that the Democrats are going to have power over others. Regrettably, the Republicans and Donald Trump and the different messaging from media is power over narrative. A parent doesn’t fight all the time. If a parent uses too much power over language and they get stuck in trying to fix the problem, truth gets worse. It’s hard because you can’t speak truth to a child that’s 11, 12 or 13. They don’t have the scope. Let alone when they get to fourteen or fifteen, they don’t have the language ability to fully process complex adult things. Adults have to do a lot of different things at once. They can’t pick. They have several choices that all of them are not the best choice. You and I as parents were faced with choices like, “Are we picking this choice or are we picking this choice?” It’s very unsettling.

This power over narrative is resonating in my mind as a listener and as somebody seeing what’s happening in the media, with a lot of attacks that the President is making on Twitter to people of color in Congress. The language he is using, it is power over because he is trying to say, “Go back to the country where you came from” or “Your city is a rat-infested nest.” The language choice he is using seemed to be something I would expect to hear maybe in high school or even younger.

I appreciate that awareness. The awareness is when you have a twelve-year-old or a thirteen-year-old speaking with limited language. They are calling it like it is, but it isn’t like it is. There is a complexity in the history of the city of Baltimore of various different challenges that it has faced. It has had trouble with its economy, police, and school systems. It’s had troubles with its social structure. That trouble with the social structure is not going to be helped by a thirteen-year-old using the word rat-infested, even though there might be a partial truth to that one street has some trash issues.

There is an adult who walked down the street and said, “Let’s clean up that street.” An adult would say, “That block needs to be renovated. There needs to be a plan for it.” It goes to show you that if a human being is focused on building one building in a real estate, he or his team mostly has their hands on, “This is going to be next. This is what we’re fixing next. The project is done. We can now open the hotel and the owner can come down an escalator and say, “What a wonderful job the team has done.” After that, he bounces to the next building he can rant about or empower people or hire contractors to finish for him.

He is trying to label the city as completely black and white, all bad and not good at all. Elijah Cummings’ district, who’s the congressman who was attacked here. One of the little towns in there is apparently one of the safest and most beautiful cities in America or at least in the Northeast. That power over narrative is putting things out of proportion which I agree is a partial truth there. The language that seems like from a twelve or thirteen-year-old is disappointing.

Every city has its problems. Los Angeles has a challenge with traffic. People will agree that Los Angeles has problems with traffic and car flows. It’s not the strongest city for transportation. It could have used a more vibrant public transportation system like it had with the red car years ago, but it does not. What’s the impact from that? The impact of that is when the message comes out that there is traffic problem in Los Angeles, people are deciding on where they would like to go for vacation, “I’m not going to go to Los Angeles because I heard the traffic is terrible.”

You will never see the traffic. You’ll sit on the beach, go to a hotel, walk out to the beach and walk back. You’ll have a magical experience wherever else in Los Angeles, whether it’s in Hollywood. There will be a lot of people, but a lot doesn’t mean it’s not enjoyable. It’s interesting and it is part of the fabric of Los Angeles that has a multi-culturally world diversity piece that makes up its city. Why am I telling you this story? I took an Uber to the airport from Denton to Dallas, Texas to get on a plane and the woman talked about the traffic in Los Angeles and how she has not been there yet.

It is a thorn in a person’s consciousness. Check how weird this is. When you call a city or a person rat-infested, they cannot pull out the thought. That’s the way middle-schoolers think. That’s the way an 11-year-old to 13-year-old think. Those messages come in and stick and they become that thing. Most media are making a complete mistake to think that he is doing this on purpose. It’s worse than that. He doesn’t have anything else. There is no vocabulary to get him out of this. He cannot think differently than this.

You can’t speak truth to a child that’s young. They don’t have the scope and the language ability to process complex adult things.

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To anybody that has worked with him and I know many people have, he can’t speak any differently like this. It’s his power over a narrative that he developed between the age of 11 and 13 to make himself sound big or where his vocabulary is not enough to get it done. The language and the vocabulary that people use can go in two directions. Number one, it makes him very articulated and very powerful because they have many different ways to say the same thing. It also can make them snooty and elite. It can push them to the worst part of being an educated person or a rich person. It’s like, “Now that I am rich, that gives me the opportunity to treat people as less than.”



If I become a noble, a queen or a king, I get to be a tyrant or autocrat or one of those elites that have a ton of money. “I got a lot of money, I could do what the hell I want over here and I’m a little bit above the law.” The scary honesty in this is that power over language is a language that has developed when many middle school teachers say, “Don’t say that.” The kid then goes, “I went too far with the power of narrative.” What the middle school teacher doesn’t know is they put power over narrative in their direction. If you put it in a military school that has that mindset and has that piece to it, what winds up happening is the person adds that adult power of narrative to their middle school narrative and we have these middle school tweets.

Didn’t it also play out similarly in 2016 when all the Republicans were jockeying for positions trying to become the Republican nominee?

Yeah, was that a middle school eighth-grade level argument on the stage? One of the Republican candidates from Ohio, John Kasich, looks and goes, “What are you arguing about?” He was the only adult on the stage. Everyone else is trying to swing it out in the middle school’s fight. Regrettably, Joe Biden is not any different here. “I’ll take him out in the back and that’s exactly what I want to see, two 70-year old swinging it out. I want to see the two of them punch each other.” What am I, a middle school here?

Can we get some language? Is that a bad thing that Joe Biden said that he would fight? If you have a bunch of middle schoolers voting for another middle schooler, the scary honesty is, “What an interesting narrative to do it.” What happens is if you hit somebody in a restaurant, a grocery store or a gas station, there will be law and police there to do something about assault and battery. There will be somebody there. That’s what that is for. The scary honesty is an adult narrative has not returned and will not come out of our President regrettably.

I agree with you completely because I’m reminded of, even after all of the tweets and the President’s attacks on Elijah Cummings and the City of Baltimore. The President’s Chief of Staff was being interviewed by Chris Wallace and was calling him out on it.

Interestingly, trying to argue the truth with the Chief of Staff, which maybe is not the best way to discuss these things. What struck me is that the Chief of Staff is in the position of having to defend the President’s words and tweets. He said, “The President is always going to fight back.” He means fight back against Elijah Cummings and trying to normalize and excuse the words.

He’s trying to say, “It’s not a racist statement.” That it’s a rat-infested community, as he is talking about this African-American congressman. He’s fighting back against when he attacked one of the other administration’s cabinet members testifying before his congressional committee. He’s somehow excusing this childish language and use of language in attacking. Another level of scary honesty is that the President’s cabinet, all of his good soldiers that are out supporting him and sometimes trying to carry forward his message. They are sometimes being put in a position of having to defend his message.

They don’t know what to say either and how to elevate it to an adult conversation.

They are not even trying to elevate it to an adult conversation.

If the Mueller Report had pictures in it, more people would have read it.

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It certainly does appear that way with the adolescent use of language that is coming in every single tweet and at every rally. Even at every White House interview, it doesn’t seem like an adult is speaking to us.

Let’s use adult language here so that at least somebody out there in the universe is going to get a piece of this, which is, “Here is what respect for others looks like.” Did you see how clean I’ve started that sentence? “Here is what the challenge is for the city of Baltimore in this certain area.” It’s not, “Have you seen in the pictures?” Have you seen the pictures of me doing a flipbook for a middle school kid? There are pictures in the book. Why do some texts don’t have any pictures in the book? Because they are accelerating on knowledge and information, the picture could be distracting or not needed for the reader. “I don’t need a picture. Use your words to describe the picture. Paint the picture for me in words.” When do we use picture? The more pictures, the younger it gets. If the Mueller report would have had pictures in it, more people would have read it.



There’s an epiphany.

You put pictures in it. “Here’s a person in a car. Here is another person in a car. This person says something. This person says something back.” That is two people talking in the language of obstruction. Can you see what was missed by the well-meaning half adults that were working in the Mueller hearings? They were not painting the picture.

All the congressmen were going for some bites and trying to proportionalize a point and Robert Mueller was trying to stay within the four corners of his report and not embellish.

The answer is all of the questions needed to be framed in pictures. The look on your face goes like, “That’s what truth would have looked like.” Because that’s what truth looks like, rat-infested is a picture. He is speaking in a picture. Who works with pictures? People that don’t use words as much. They use more pictures.

It’s easy for people’s brains to latch on. The little scientific fact that I happen to know is your hemoglobin in your blood will attach carbon monoxide. It will suck it up a lot faster, even if oxygen is in the air. That’s why when you have a car that’s running in a closed garage or you have a gas furnace that is broken and puts carbon monoxide into the air, it’s dangerous to your body and you can die from it so quickly. To me, it’s like the masses of people out there are like hemoglobin and they are attaching onto the easiest thing that they can grab, not where truth is.

As a biology person, that metaphor is outstanding. The carbon molecules have oxygen in it and that makes it more attractive and a picture is going to pull that thing and going to stick an imprint. It is when our brain is in distress and it’s trying to fight through or sort through information. It doesn’t want to take the time as an adult would take the time to breathe the oxygen. It wants to do this. It doesn’t want to take the time to have a full meal. It wants to have a snack. It doesn’t take the time to eat healthy food. It wants comfort food instead.

The language of the adult would need to lean on what does integrity looks like? What does fairness look like? What does mutual respect look like? Start the sentence with a word that you can build around that is going to be able to paint the picture. Notice I’m using the phrase, “What would look like?” Because this whole show, the whole idea of the work that I do is, “How do you speak better language to people?” If my twelve-year-old wants to give me power over pushback, I need to be a compassionate parent. I don’t need to be a person that has a middle school narrative and throw that back at him to get him in line.