By Taylor Allyn
July 16, 2025
There were only two things my father told me not to do. Lie. Steal.
Not because it made you good. Because it kept you free. Because a man who lies will spend his life hiding from truth, and a man who steals will believe nothing was ever anyone's to begin with.
Something in us recognizes the weight of this teaching, the way it cuts through noise to bone. You know the feeling—when simple truth arrives dressed as complexity, when the thing your body knew gets words.
We built entire civilizations on the opposite lesson.
James Baldwin knew something about the seduction of hatred, how it masquerades as protection: "People cling to their hatred because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."
"People cling to their hatred because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain."
Lies are what keep hatred breathing. Stealing is what keeps it fed. And we—we have become master educators in both.
Look at what we've named our systems. Education. Journalism. Justice. Each one built on the beautiful promise of truth-telling, each one perfected in the art of its betrayal. This is not irony. This is architecture. This is the particular kind of building that requires you to forget the blueprint while you're laying the foundation.
You've felt it too, haven't you? The way we've trained ourselves to call confusion "critical thinking," to mistake reaction for reflection. The way we've taught our children to scroll past understanding, to swipe away complexity, to double-tap their way to wisdom.
We told them: Find your truth. As if truth were something personal, something hidden in a social media algorithm, something that changes with your location settings.
We forgot to whisper the harder thing: Truth exists whether you find it or not. Whether you like it or not. Whether it serves your argument or destroys it.
Toni Morrison understood the deeper game being played. In Playing in the Dark, she wrote: "The very serious function of racism is distraction."
"The very serious function of racism is distraction."
But what is our current moment if not distraction perfected? What is misinformation but racism's methodology applied to everything—the same deliberate confusion, the same calculated dizzy-making, the same strategy of keeping people too turned around to see clearly?
We handed our children distraction and called it democracy. We gave them distortion and named it freedom. And now we act surprised when they can't tell the difference between feeling and knowing, between opinion and fact, between the story that serves them and the truth that might save them.
Malcolm X spoke the thing we still refuse to hear: "Only a fool lets his enemy educate his children."
"Only a fool lets his enemy educate his children."
And we? We didn't just let the enemy into the classroom. We gave them the curriculum. We handed them the algorithm. We let them design the platforms where our children learn what it means to be human.
What are we doing if not raising fools for slaughter? And what are we if not the fools who raised them?
We handed our children distraction and called it democracy. We gave them distortion and named it freedom.
You know what they're learning. You see it in their eyes when they look at you—that particular combination of pity and contempt reserved for people who still believe in the old lies about how things work.
They're learning that truth bends if you scream loud enough. That stealing someone's reality earns you followers. That lying isn't failure—it's content creation.
They're learning that history is whatever you can make trend, that science is whatever serves your side, that democracy is whatever gets you what you want.
And they're learning something else, something that cuts deeper than cynicism: that the adults who raised them don't really believe in anything at all. That everything we told them was important—truth, integrity, justice—were just words we used to make ourselves feel better about the world we were leaving them.
They are watching us lie. Watching us steal. Not just elections or science or history, but something more fundamental—the possibility of shared reality itself.
These are not small losses. These are the gravitational forces that hold civilization together. And they are failing.
Barack Obama tried to name this gently at a forum this year: "We want diversity of opinion. Not diversity of fact."
"We want diversity of opinion. Not diversity of fact."
But we are long past gentle truths. We are in the aftermath of gentle truths, living in the rubble of all the soft ways we tried to say hard things.
Audre Lorde knew what we're learning now: "Your silence will not protect you."
Your silence will not protect them either. Not from the collapse we've been feeding them spoonful by spoonful. Not from the consequences of the lessons we refused to teach while teaching the lessons we swore we wouldn't.
"Your silence will not protect you."
When it all falls apart—and some part of you knows it will, some part of you has been waiting for it to fall apart—they won't wonder why.
It started here. With us. With the moment we decided that keeping them comfortable was more important than keeping them clear. With the moment we chose their feelings over their future.
Don't lie. Don't steal.
My father's voice, carrying across decades, carrying the weight of what we've lost and what we might still save.
That should have been enough.
Instead, it's where this all began.
Let that be enough—for now.
Citations:
James Baldwin — The Fire Next Time (1963)
Toni Morrison — Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)
Malcolm X — The Ballot or the Bullet, April 3, 1964, Cleveland, Ohio
Barack Obama — The Connecticut Forum, June 17, 2025
Audre Lorde — The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (1977)