Confronting Ugly Truths

Blind, closed,
Suspicious, afraid,
Ignorance
Protects itself,
And protected,
Ignorance grows.
—Octavia Butler,
Parable of the Talents

I remember when I first learned about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. I was in my mid-fifties, and I was listening, ironically, to the NPR station out of that very city as I was driving down I-44, headed west to visit my beloved New Mexico. The local broadcast was carrying a story about the debate over reparations for the descendants of the survivors, and I distinctly recall thinking “how is it possible for me to have lived to be 53 years old and never have heard of this before now?” I was appalled that a significant dark chapter of our history had never made it into any textbook or lesson I had ever encountered during my schooling years, and I can still feel the consequent internal shift in my paradigms as I realized how much more unpacking my white privilege still needed than had been done to date.

I share this preface because about a month ago, I was again listening to NPR when the series Throughline came on as I was prepping for my morning run, and they were airing an episode about the science fiction writer, Octavia Butler. Butler—who black, female, and gay was the antithesis of the stereotypical sci-fi author—is a voice I have known about for many decades but whom I had never actually read, and by the end of that Throughline, I knew it was time to change that fact. Fortunately, my school’s library has copies of what are considered her three most significant works, and so I borrowed both volumes in the Parable series and got to work.

And after reading them, I can declare categorically that I would choose to live in Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy COMBINED before I would ever willingly live in the dystopian hell that Butler describes. So nightmarish did I find the alternate reality she sets forth that there were times when I had to compel myself to read further. What she writes is just that bleak and disturbing.

Yet why, a reasonable reader might ask, would I do that? Why force myself to read something so obviously discomfiting? My answer is: for the same reason that I should have learned about the Tulsa Race Massacre long before I did. Ugly truths are no less truths, and it became very clear early on in both books that Butler is using her own experience as a black, gay woman in the Los Angeles of the 1990s to inform the storyline. She is effectively elaborating what it is like to live as a black person in this country, a woman in this country, and a homosexual in this country, and very little of that experience is “pretty.” It is why I don’t think I can ever read what is considered Butler’s other most significant work, Kindred, because while I have understood for quite some time now the horror that nearly 100% of black women in this country’s history experienced rape (and often multiple times), the awareness that one would not exist as a black person today without that long ago act of rape (and sometimes not so long ago)…. I have no words.

Still I write, and I do so because part of what makes Butler’s work so compelling to this privileged white, heterosexual male is that she confronts readers of any background with the reality that ugly truths inform and impact all of our lives and that the most dangerous thing about ignorance of any kind is the threat it poses to acknowledging this reality. We already avoid so-called inconvenient truths at our peril; we avoid ugly truths at our demise.

Which is, of course, fine with the current administration in charge of the Executive branch of this country. The less truth the better as far as anyone in the White House is concerned. Ignore the U.S. Constitution and the Rule of Law. Ignore medical science and its impact on public health. Ignore climate change and its consequent loss in lives and livelihoods. Ignore the murder of two U.S. citizens in cold blood. Ignore basic human moral decency. Ignore. Ignore. Ignore.

The danger of ignoring, though, is the cultivation of ignorance, and as Butler wisely observes, ignorance will do anything and everything in its power to grow. We are watching that reality even now as one of the greatest social experiments in human history—a nation “of the people, by the people, and for the people”—systematically self-immolates because we don’t like confronting ugly truths about ourselves. Doing so is messy, uncomfortable, and regularly painful, and the simple certainty is that I owe my very existence to violence perpetrated upon others because there is at least one rape, murder, or pillage somewhere in every genetic line. In addtion, I owe at least a portion of my current status and wealth in our society to the programmatic violence that was slavery in this country. I do not “enjoy” knowing either of these facts, but their knowledge enables me to understand what actions I must take with others to create the conditions for less violence, more empathy, greater compassion, and increasing justice for “all God’s children.”

Again, the most perverse conviction of the Trumpian weltanschauung and those who seek it is the belief that returning to the willful ignorance of a previous age—when closets weren’t just for clothing, misogyny was hip, and the N-word not forbidden—will somehow make the perceived “flaws” in the liberal agenda for building a more humane, equitable, and ecologically sound world go away. Trump and his allies (which ironically include some women and people of color) want to make “everything better” once more for the white male heteronormative hegemony, and their principal tool in these efforts is the elevation of ignorance: to promote falsehoods, to attack even the most vaguely unpleasant truths, and to disable critical thinking through a firehose of compassion fatigue. All to maintain a caste system grounded in a myth of American exceptionalism.

Which brings me to a personal “ugly” truth I find distressing and distasteful to acknowledge: the realization that I, too, have bought into to certain components of that myth. Don’t get me wrong; anyone who has read pretty much anything I have written knows my embrace of the truth that the United States is fundamentally and foundationally a racist, sexist patriarchy built on the blood of generations of disadvantaged people. We’ve got a LONG way to go before declaring ourselves “the New Jerusalem.” But in fits and starts, we did at least seem to be going—chattel slavery was abolished; my mother would eventually possess her own credit card; there is a minimum wage—and that’s where I realized the impact of the myth on myself: I believed the social experiment itself was exceptional, that a “nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” could survive anything thrown at it and eventually evolve into its more noble potential.

However, I now have more than a year of observable primate behavior of the basest sort to confront me with the ugly truth that the American experiment in democracy is no more exceptional than any other social construct humans have invented, all of them utterly dependent on the qualities of the experiment’s participants. Qualities that right now I am at my most pessimistic about, especially given the rise of technologies with deliberately designed algorithms to cater to the human brain’s most primitive whims. Ignorance growing indeed!

Yet pessimism doesn’t let me off the hook. As I have oft quoted my mentor, the Jewish philosopher, Steven Schwarzschild, “just because the world is ending doesn’t excuse you from getting dressed for dinner.” The American experiment may not be exceptional, but that doesn’t make the fight for civil rights, empowering women, and fair compensation for employment any less important or worthy an endeavor. If anything, that is the actual value of ugly truths: without confronting them, you cannot grow and change for the better.

Which, interestingly enough, is a significant message in Octavia Butler’s work. None of her protagonists are hapless, helpless, or hopeless. In the face of world’s they did not create, they are the very embodiment of strength, resilience, and resolve, and they manage their lives successfully amidst the proverbial “gloom and doom”—much as humans have been doing daily ever since our ancestors first evolved a little over 350,000 years ago. We have been fruitfully navigating ugly truths for a very long time.

So tomorrow morning, I will get up as I have now for more than thirty-seven and a half years and head off to school. I will teach my students of all colors about the heightened cortisol levels of their dark-skinned classmates and the negative impact this has on their daily health and lifespans. I will teach my students of all sexualities and genders about the evolution of the LGBTQIA+ phenotypes throughout the entire animal kingdom and why natural selection has maintained these value-added traits for millions of years. I will teach my students of all socio-economic backgrounds the realities of a finite planet and its limited carrying capacity for any species and why, thererfore, it might be a good idea to learn how to consume less and to share more. And I will teach my fellow carbon-based lifeforms that the natural cycling of this critical element has been vital to the wellbeing of our planet for billions of years but that continuing to abruptly dump millions of years of fossilized photosynthesis into the atmosphere might not be our smartest idea as a species.

In other words, I will teach truth, however unfashionable or ugly it might be, and I will fight ignorance, however quixotic that can sometimes feel. Because to do anything less is to dishonor the millennia of ancestors who confronted their own ugly truths to make our lives today possible. The lie presently in the White House may be endangering the American experiment, but that lie only succeeds if we ignore it.

References

Arablouei, R., et al. (Jan. 1, 2026) Winter Book Club: Octavia Butler’s Visionary Fiction. Throughline. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/01/nx-s1-5643047/winter-book-club-octavia-butlers-visionary-fiction.

Butler, O. (1993) Parable of the Sower. London: Headline Publishing Group.

Butler, O. (1998) Parable of the Talents. London: Headline Publishing Group.

Where Will We Go from Here?

You’ve got to be proud of your wounds.
—Nancy Pelosi

One of the great challenges I have when I’m writing these days is having anything I say remain remotely significant before getting the chance to upload it, such is the deranged chaos of the Trump presidency. Because I can only compose on weekends during the school year, I will start discussing my reaction to something I’ve encountered only to have what I’m writing about feel almost banal before I can return to it. Case in point, here is how this current essay began quite recently:

As most who know me can well imagine, I have been a loyal subscriber to Scientific American for almost 30 years now. In addition, I am one of those readers who actually starts on the first page and reads the entire issue cover-to-cover, including the math articles I can barely follow at times. I’m just that curious.

However, as the ancient dictum about cats reminds us, sometimes curiosity can be a dangerous thing—or at least psychologically problematic—and so I found myself finishing up the December 2025 issue just moribundly depressed—or at least discouraged. With one exception (which, ironically, was about post-partum depression), every feature article contained gloomy news about the future. There was the story about oil and gas companies pivoting to plastic to keep their profits flowing as more people purchase all-electric vehicles. Potential individualized cancer vaccines are being defunded by Kennedy’s HHS while Martian soil samples are now trapped inside NASA’s Perseverance because of Trump’s budget cuts to basic research. And the “highlight” of all “highlights:” a story about AI avatars for grieving the dead. Heck, even the commentary section contained news of more teenagers turning to chatbots as alternatives to personal relationships. It was just dark reporting piled on top of dark reporting.

I share all of this because I want readers to know the kind of mental mindset I was in when—on only the second day of the new year—I read the following headline in my local newspaper:

“Paramedic Under Investigation for Explicit Videos Defends Urinating in Family’s Food.”

Yes, reread that. Defends. Urinating. In food. A headline featured not in a tabloid but in a reputable news source was informing me that someone who society entrusts with people’s lives was arguing that it is okay to piss on material intended for human consumption. And that wasn’t even what had gotten him into trouble!

How did we get here? And more importantly, where do we go? While I pretty much know the answer to the first question (much of my writing is about it), I find myself feeling so mentally gob-smacked right now by everything that headline implies about us as a culture, that I am at a loss for any possible answer to the second one. Essayist Robert Fulghum reminds us to be wary of judgment, that “change the name, and the story is told of you.” But I find myself living in a world where there are now “shoes” I just cannot envision ever “walking in” and where there are now entire “warehouses” of such footwear strolling around our public domains. Granted, this guy got into trouble because he crossed a boundary in what remains of our social norms, but look at what our President’s done this past year and how much of our paramedic’s trouble is just his lack of political capital?

Oh! To go back to the relative naivete of when I wrote those words! News of some nitwit videotaping his genitals pales—indeed becomes outright invisible—when held up against the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation and a government condoned murder of a mother of three. My bewildered appall at someone defending their stupidity appears almost silly now when compared to the disgusted outrage I should feel at the absolute madness coming out of the minds of this administration. Where do we go, indeed!

Yet as tempting as it is, I can’t just rant. Cursing the darkness solves nothing, defeats nothing, illuminates nothing; it doesn’t even ultimately make the curser feel any better. The only way to banish darkness is to irradiate it, to make it fully visible for the evil it is and to chip away at its shadow with truth, honesty, and integrity. Admittedly, those three things feel in short supply right now (with AI threatening their very existence in today’s world). But as an educator (and especially as a science teacher), I am here to tell you that we in the veracity-manufacturing business are still hard at work, doing our best to fight the fundamental root of all evil: ignorance.

And a partner in that fight is nuance—bringing me to a marvelous book I just finished entitled, The Light Eaters. In it, the author, Zoë Schlanger, explores the latest science about our green friends, the plants—who, for those who don’t know this, literally build their bodies out of light itself and then pass that light onto us in the form of food—and near its beginning, Ms. Schlanger shares a sentiment both pertinent to this discussion and too beautiful not to pass on when she writes: “the world we could have if complexity was not backgrounded was the world I wanted to live in.” She then effectively invites the reader to join her in doing just that during the remainder of the book, and as I simultaneously processed both her book and the stupidity coming out of the White House, I began to realize that THAT was the root of all the overall awfulness of Trump’s actions (as well as those of any other petty tyrant): the “backgrounding” of the complexity of truth.

What’s more, I realized that this dismissal of truth’s fundamental nuanced nature is not only the foundation of Trump’s evil, it is also the source of its ultimate downfall. Because reality is going to BE complex regardless of whether any human might wish it otherwise. You can rip a brutal dictator out of his bed in the middle of the night, but doing so isn’t going to cause multinational corporations to suddenly risk billions of dollars in investments in a just-destabilized country. You can invade and terrorize entire communities of people, even murdering some of them in cold blood, but you still cannot make the jobs the foreign-born fill any less central to our economy or any more likely to be filled by so-called “real” Americans. You can even go on national television and bully the citizens of this country about the “affordability myth,” but you can’t make the price of groceries and housing come down with tariffs. The bottom line is that everything the Trump administration does offers nothing but simplistic (and often simpleton) responses to complex situations, and the people impacted—including his MAGA political base—have only seen those situations get worse. We are in desperate need of nuance.

Yet such a thing is challenging to find in today’s society, and before I address what we might do to change that fact, I do need to acknowledge first that I get the desire for simplicity; I truly do. I know firsthand the deep psychological longing for simple, binary, black-white, on-off, arithmetic answers: 1+1=2; a²+b²=c²; plug in “x” and find “y.” No need for the difficulty of adjusting one’s personal lifestyle or worldview. No need for the complications that come with inconvenient truths such as climate change or human infidelity. No need for the involvedness of truly “loving your neighbor as yourself.” Nice simple solutions, and I can get back to my Netflix.

Life, though, (as I continue to repeat ad nauseum to anyone who will listen) is messy. Always has been; always will be. Even math, that ultimate arbiter of simplicity, gets messy once you reach calculus (I will never forget the class where I discovered that an integral could have more than one totally correct answer!). Therefore, messy is simply “baked in” (just ask the quantum physicists), and no amount of apps or AI is ever going to remove all the messy from our lives (just ask the biologists).

Which brings me back why I write any of these essays—education. If ignorance is the root of all evil, then teaching and learning about what is true and real is the ultimate defense for the good. Furthermore, that teaching and learning can only lead to any good if it is messy and nuanced in its character and structure. What I think that needs to look like is the fundamental point of this whole on-line project; so I’m simply going to steer anyone interested to actually read some of the chapters in my book to learn more about my concept of “authentic engagement.” But for now, I conclude this particular set of musings by offering one possible interpretation of what I think Nancy Pelosi might have meant when she spoke the words in this essay’s epigram in an interview I once overheard: messy and wounded are inexorably linked; so wherever possible, engage in messes where you can be proud of your inevitable injury. The wounds are how we show we cared.

References

Doyle, C. & Bansil, S. (Jan. 2, 2026) Paramedic Under Investigation for Explicit Videos Defends Urinating in Family’s Food. The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebanner.com/community/criminal-justice/chris-carroll-baltimore-county-paramedic-XQODS6ZUQVH4TPPSCSUFNKBQSA/.

Fulghum, R. (1989) It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It. New York: Villard Books.

Schlanger, Z. (2024) The Light Eaters. New York: Harper Perennial.