Being Honest
We have to be honest.
It’s not uncommon, especially in the circles and conversations I tend to find myself in, to hear, be soothed, and maybe even moved by the call, no matter how generic and ambiguous, to honesty.
Dripping with some version of virtue, honesty, let us tell it, is to be our salvation. That seems to be enough for us. Just be honest. It’s that simple.
Like so much of the human experience within empire, who needs to be honest and about what remains unsaid. Making honesty a myth, an anethestia for wounds we never acknowledge. The muscles required for healing: atrophied.
Normally, I would be at the bus stop playing two-hand touch football with my brother, the next-door neighbor, a couple other kids from the neighborhood, and my dad, who was the all-time quarterback every morning.
My dad worked overnights. He got home about an hour before the bus was scheduled to pick us up, and he always stayed up to go with us to the bus stop. To this day he would tell you he could complete a pass in the NFL, and judging from those bus stop games and button-hook bullets, I’m not sure he is totally wrong. But this is about honesty.
Normally, we would have been at the bus stop. This morning was different. I don’t know why, but this morning there were no buses, and we were being dropped off at school. We pulled up to the small-ass Catholic school that was my whole world, and many of the twenty students in my grade, which felt like a whole nation, were also being dropped off. I leaned over, gave my dad a hug goodbye, he kissed my forehead, and told me he loved me, like he always did, and I went about my business.
I got a few steps beyond the front entrance of the old brick building when my neighbor stopped me and started calling me gay. He was huddled with a few other boys in my class and was telling them how he saw my dad give me a kiss, and that made me gay. I don’t remember how the others reacted, mainly because I went on the offensive. I remember grabbing my neighbor by the throat. The truth is, there was nothing honest going on.
The principal called my parents. I told them my neighbor called me gay and what I did. I knew I wasn’t going to get in trouble. If I was honest. If I told the truth, I had nothing to worry about. My parents always told us we could defend ourselves. But an accurate re-telling of what happened isn’t the same thing as being honest.
If we were being honest, we would have talked about how his dad was never around. We would have talked about where we learned that gay was an insult worthy of fighting over. If we were being honest, we would have talked about why it felt weird to him to see a man show love to his son in that way. If we were being honest, we would have talked about me questioning my dad's love in that moment. We would have talked about the shame we both felt, for different reasons.
If we were honest.
It wasn’t a particularly noteworthy morning. I was taking classes at a local community college because I didn’t know how to maneuver the landscape of a first-generation college student and missed all kinds of deadlines and whatnot. I told everybody I was doing it for financial reasons, true but not honest. I was depressed and felt like a failure. I was determined to transfer to a four-year in time for the spring semester. That made the part-time job at UPS even less meaningful than everybody already knew it was. To be honest.
The only good thing about my 9:00 am class was that it gave my chubby, working-hard-to-be-fat ass enough time to get up and out of my parents basement in time to get the double chocolate muffins from the local coffee shop right as they came out of the oven. To be honest, when you are a depressed, probably in over your head, terrified of a whole lot, going to remedial classes that make you feel like a failure 18-year-old, there is nothing like a warm, gooey double chocolate muffin.
I rushed to park and ran through the excuses I could use for being late to class. I was so focused I didn’t even notice the small group in front of the television in the lobby. It wasn’t until I swung the classroom door open and stepped into an empty room that I knew something was wrong.
I didn’t listen to the radio much. I had one of the CD to cassette converters in my car, so I kept my music in rotation. But that morning, on my way back to my parents house, I turned on the radio. Two planes had been flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York City; one of the towers had already collapsed. The broadcasters were talking about America being underattack.
I had never heard a silence so loud as when I walked into the UPS center that night. It felt like everything except UPS had shut down. The conveyor belts ran with no packages. Trucks sat empty with loaders hovering around looking at each other. When I got to my dock there was a group of about five guys talking about the attacks. One of them, I forget buddy’s name, but he had found a purpose. He was going to enlist because “those fuckers can’t get away with attacking the US!” The others just nodded. I walked away. I didn’t know how to be honest in that moment.
Over the next days and weeks and months there would be so many moments of not knowing how to be honest. So, we didn’t. We feel in line with the patriotism and truth behind the need for the Patriot Act. We believed wild stories about weapons of mass destruction and the barbarism and savagery of a people that were never defined. Sprinkles of truth filling gaps in honesty.
Last week, one of my former students called me. He just wanted to talk. He was struggling to make sense of the world. He is bright and beautiful, and we are lucky to be alive at the same time as him. He asked me, with a heaviness that demands honesty, “Why the hell did I enlist?” It’s not the first time he has asked me. I was vocal about not wanting recruiters in the school I taught at when he was there, the principal at the time (who would later become the president and is currently the president at a local Catholic high school) threatened my job. Honestly, I don’t know if I did enough. What I do know is that I get regular phone calls where I help this beautiful, loving soul make sense of “literally learning to kill children when I was a child myself!” I swallow hard and commit to honesty: “This is what America has always done because we have not been honest.” There’s a heavy silence; “but Mr. V what can we do?” He asks with so much sincerity I want to lie.
The last time we spoke, I was making my way through TSA Precheck. I would make my flight and not have to take my shoes off to get through screening. The best $85 I’ve spent. And this is the point of it all.
If we are honest.
We are less than ten days from the election. I sat down in hopes of catching some bonus coverage of the Baltimore vs. Cleveland game. I really don’t understand how anybody beats Baltimore, but I digress. The first thing I see when I turn on the TV is a Trump ad. The blatant transphobia, misogyny, and racism of his ads don’t surprise me. Honestly, I wish they did. I don’t want to be numb to this level of hurt and harm. And that’s what this is. And it’s not just Trump. Many of us tell the truth about Trump, but we aren’t being honest.
So, let’s be honest.
The best way to be honest is to be specific about who needs to be honest and about what. There are certainly many individuals and even groups of people who need to be honest about lots of things, but the group I’m talking to is white men. Men like me. And I want us to be honest about how hurt we are.
We have to be honest about this. We are hurting. How could we not be? We have received and dolled out so much cruelty and perversion that it’s hard to remember we are children of god. And when we do, even our god tells us we aren’t shit. We carry that with us. We hold it close until it can’t hurt us anymore. We are choking on the languages that have been silenced in our wake. We fear the curses of the gods we subsumed. The families we fractured serve as fault lines in our own humanity.
We have to be honest.
We have to share our dreams of tenderness. We have to communicate the way we crave connection. We have to show up in our humanity. It’s more than telling the truth. We should do that. Honesty is the courage to explore the why. To conquer the consequences of our refusal to be honest.
This is how we heal. Healing is the most honest thing we can do.
Honesty is hard. Honesty requires so much more than physical strength, intellectual aptitude, or even financial prowess. Too often, we mistakenly believe these things shape the contours of honesty, What hubris!
Honesty is a journey. It’s one we need to begin immediately. That is really what we are choosing this November. Will we have the time and space to begin being honest? Because we have to be honest, Kamala is not a champion of honesty or healing. But there is space for truth there. Will we choose it? Or, will we choose the lie? Choose the contraction? Choose the perversion? Will we swallow the hurt and the pain until it eclipses the parts of us that feel joy and love?
My daughter asked me, “Dad, is Kamala going to win?”
I told her:
If we are honest.
