Why can't I say it if it's true?

It's OK to move out of your lane.

Photo by L N on Unsplash

On a long flight home from London a couple of months ago, I had the rare pleasure of several hours alone.

While those hours admittedly did not come under optimal conditions — I was crammed into a flying tube with plentiful but not exactly hand-picked entertainment options, and I was sleep-deprived as well — when you are a parent you take what you can get.

Scrolling through the in-flight entertainment options, I came across a movie title that made me do a double-take: “Downtown Owl.”

Wait a minute, my soggy brain said, that can’t be the same Downtown Owl that was a Chuck Klosterman novel several years prior.

So I read the synopsis, and my brain started to catch up.

Yes, of course it’s a film adaptation of the novel. Do you think there are two separate stories called “Downtown Owl” in this world?

My surprise, having read everything Klosterman has written, was in not knowing it had been made into a movie. Then again, my pop culture relevance started to wane in 2014 when our first child was born and has been on a steady decline ever since then.

The novel came out in 2008. The movie, it turns out, came out in 2023.

It’s not my favorite Klosterman book, but I enjoyed it. And it has stuck with me largely because of the setting: a fictional small town in North Dakota in the 1980s, a time and place both of us lived through.

Klosterman was born in 1972 (four years before me) and grew up on a farm in a much more rural part of North Dakota than I did, but the characters in the novel still felt like they could have been my relatives or friends.

He graduated from the University of North Dakota the same year I graduated from Grand Forks Central High School. When he gave our journalism class a shoutout in one of his final college newspaper columns, a space that had earned him at least some level of local celebrity that foreshadowed his future success, we all nearly fainted from the attention.

The movie version of “Downtown Owl” also wasn’t my favorite, but again it stuck with me. The plot tracks a few parallel stories in this fictional small town of Owl — an outsider teaching at the high school, an inappropriate relationship in the school, small town football and a kind old tragic figure among them — toward a crescendo of an out-of-nowhere blizzard.

Before that, though, the main character (the outsider teaching at the high school) has an alcohol-fueled breakdown. Tired of all that is unspoken in the community and the secrets everyone is holding in, she shouts out several of the forbidden topics as others try to calm her down.

“It’s true!” she screams, sobbing. “Why can’t I say it if it’s true?”

It’s the defining question of a previous era, place and generation bent on stoicism and leaving things left unsaid.

And I can’t help but think about it, too, in the context of how we are living now.

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One of my favorite things is when I have been ruminating on a topic for a while, picking at threads but feeling like it is lacking a critical piece of connective tissue … and then, bam, the final piece appears right as I need it.

“Why can’t I say it if it’s true” is something that I feel like screaming almost every day, an odd feeling for someone whose chosen profession is very much about facts and truth.

Freddie deBoer put words to what this feeling means in a Substack piece Friday (one that pushed me into the territory of paid subscriber).

Though the larger work dove into pop culture fandom, the early part uses his extensive research “about the phenomenon of adolescent women on TikTok pretending to have dissociative identity disorder for social media clout and attention.”

And he uses that as an entry point to talk about how everyone he interviews about the subject agrees with him but nobody will say it because, more or less, they fear retribution or that at least it just isn’t worth incurring the wrath of those living very online. He writes:

What you usually have, or used to have, is the ability to tell someone doing stupid shit to knock it off. Not oppress anyone, not humiliate anyone, not permanently shun anyone. But just to say, “You don’t have dissociative identity disorder, pretending you do is unhealthy and offensive towards people who actually have serious mental illnesses, knock it off.” I find that very easy to say. But clearly a lot of people don’t, and the reasons are fairly obvious.

deBoer also laments that there is no space for disagreement within groups that are supposed to agree, concluding with the wonderful phrasing, “I’m afraid we do not have a vocabulary for critical solidarity anymore.”

He is essentially yelling for all of us (and for himself): “Why can’t I say it if it’s true?”

This is not the same as abandoning compassion or being hurtful with our appraisals, particularly of people. I think Will Leitch wrote well about this a couple weeks ago in describing the exhaustion a lot of people have felt in recent years in monitoring everything they say for fear or stepping on a land mine or at least a trap and becoming The Main Character for a day while social media warriors heap scorn on them. Leitch concludes adjacently but differently from deBoer that:

I think when you strip all the political messaging out of it, and we stop thinking about The Way We Talk as some sort of signifier or indicator … it’s still good to be careful how you talk about people. It still matters. It’s part of being an evolved human being. It’s a way to just keep trying to get better. Isn’t that we’re supposed to do?

I’m here for that, obviously; there is a difference between being an absolute jerk and trying to work through a fact or opinion that might be unpopular but which has merit.

The culture (particularly online) that deBoer in particular describes, though, is one that insists on absolute truths. It a mentality of (my words here) “these are the sorts of things you are supposed to think if you want to be on the right side of the story, so don’t you dare deviate from that script.”

Why is this controversial? Not everybody has to think the exact same things. In fact, they shouldn’t!

We will all be better off as we seek out more diverse thoughts and aren’t afraid to share them.

For me, this shows up in a re-examination of assumptions, particularly those that I reflexively agreed with in the name of thinking the thing I was supposed to think.

Some of this lately has led me to think fresh about the COVID-19 pandemic, in both how it was handled but also how it accelerated our collective dive into the online world and exacerbated our departure from critical solidarity.

There were two sides, two lanes, and you had to pick one. There was no room for nuance or debate, and even a suggestion otherwise needed to be whispered.

It’s a dangerous bit of half-decade ago quarterbacking to relitigate every decision that was made, but I do now think this: There is a large slice of American society that has an increasingly low risk tolerance, made perhaps so by the ease of modern living. A lot of the rules of the U.S. pandemic response were made for those people and by similarly risk-averse people, and they were by and large a group that could afford to have those rules in place.

Very few consequences, unintended in many cases, were considered in the process of pursuing the eradication of risk to its smallest possible decimal point. It all seemed logical to me at the time, as a father with three young kids and someone who could perform my work remotely, and I’m not exactly sure what I would do differently now. But I am sure that there were consequences even for the privileged — and that those who actually took on far more risk but didn’t have the rules built for them came out of it behind and properly frustrated.

You can agree or disagree. You can let me know about it, and I can take in that opinion. I can recalibrate what I think based on that, somewhere between “my mind hasn’t changed at all” to “my mind has been changed completely,” likely somewhere in between on that sliding scale. And then this process can continue.

I don’t think it’s in dispute that the wealth gap widened during pandemic, but here’s a link just in case.

People are mad and frustrated by the general direction of things, something a lot of us can feel just by walking around, and it came out in some pretty ugly but telling ways in the midst of this week’s biggest story.

The two biggest truths there: The fatal ambush in New York City of UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson was a tragedy; and people are justifiably angry about the worst parts of a broken health care system.

It’s hard to get people to agree to an “and” instead of a “but” there, though it’s an important distinction.

Even when two things are true at the same time, especially if they seem to be competing against each other, we need to say it.