The Truth We Tell

I’ve been persuaded in recent months that the time has come for anyone capable of bearing witness to the truth, to do so – including me. My integrity isn’t rooted in who listens to me; it’s based in what I say whether anyone is listening or not.

We’re in a critical time. We need to be clear about the truth because the air around us, especially air that originates as “political commentary” from Fox News and its right-wing partners, is full of lies.

Some lies are huge (e.g., President Biden did not win the 2020 election). Some lies are just ridiculous and would, if no one believed them, be almost amusing (how about the myth that Hillary Clinton was abusing children in a Washington DC pizzeria?). Some lies nearly seem true; others are obviously false.

What concerns me most isn’t one lie or two, but the combinations of falsehoods that weave a dishonest reading of history, for example, that the rioters who killed police officers protecting the Congress on January 6 were legitimate patriot protesters.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” a claim generally attributed to Nazi Joseph Goebbels. His disciple Donald Trump translated the claim into a strategy: Lie loud. Lie often. Lie consistently.

Every American capable of speaking the truth needs to do it now. This is the time. This is the crisis. The consequences of speaking out are likely to cost some popularity, perhaps expose us to some risk. It doesn’t matter. We need to speak out now.

There are crowds who love the angry speeches delivered by Trump and his minions. They love the fury, the protection of their guns, the domination of women’s bodies, the claim that crime is a pleasure in communities of poverty, the demonstration that immigrants are worthy of abuse. My witnessing to the truth may not change a single mind in those crowds. Their motto may be, “My mind’s made up; don’t confuse me with the facts.”

But testifying on behalf of the truth is still the right strategy. The truth is not that hard to uncover. The parade of witnesses and deluge of evidence produced by one Congressional Committee provides truth enough for any of us. The truth isn’t mysterious, it’s just ugly. And in this setting, silence is complicity.

Perhaps one reader, one friend or cousin, is genuinely uncertain about what’s true and what’s not. I’d invite him or her to look with me at the evidence. The strange theory that promotes hate or rage isn’t justified; it’s a naked claim, and readily set aside by someone of good will. Besides, if a lie can win by noisy repetition, maybe the quiet truth can win support by our testimony.

“What you do to resist evil affects me and my resistance affects you,” wrote Fred Smith. “Every time you tell the truth when you could have lied…you are restraining the power of hopelessness and lawlessness.”

Against the flood of lies and deception stands the truth. Each time we speak the truth, says Smith, “It is one more sandbag stacked against the flood.”

This is my sandbag for today. Join me with yours and we’ll soon have a wall that, unlike the Trump debacle, is truly worth building.

Bearing Witness

 I’m modestly famous for a speech I gave thirty years ago. It was called “A Whisper of AIDS,” offered as a keynote address at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston.

On that steaming Wednesday evening, I began by asking the Republican Party “to lift the shroud of silence which has been draped over the issue of HIV/AIDS. I have come tonight to bring our silence to an end.”

I don’t have, or expect, an invitation to any Republican events in 2022. What it meant to be Republican has been eviscerated. I’ve grown old watching that Party’s demise as it has sunk into the depths of prejudice, injustice, brutality and an embarrassing absence of moral integrity symbolized by an ex-president who is a national scandal.

What hasn’t changed in the thirty years since Houston is the need for people to bear witness. In 1992, my aim was to show the world that AIDS was the child of a virus, not the offspring of a moral failing. I was my own example. I bore witness by presenting my dying body as evidence that AIDS was not merely a gay man’s disease; by staking my claim to the reality that “the AIDS virus is not a political creature. It does not care whether you are Democrat or Republican. It does not ask whether you are black or white, male or female, gay or straight, young or old.” I bore witness.

For a decade or two following my evening in Houston I gave speeches, initially several each week, sometimes two or three a day. I traveled the country, and later the globe, speaking and bearing witness to what it means to be HIV-positive, why stigma is a ferocious enemy, and what policies were (and still are) needed to bring justice and healing to the global AIDS communities. I spoke and I spoke and I spoke. Eventually, age and repetition – and a fairly mean and stubborn case of cancer – made me emotionally hoarse. I was increasingly unsure that public speaking mattered. I mostly went quiet.

Whether speaking out publicly is an effective policy-change strategy or not, I’ve come to believe that it’s necessary. Raped women dare not speak out; someone needs to speak for them. Abused children are gagged by their abusers. Political leaders in Arizona and Texas are silent as the bodies of migrants, stuffed into hellishly hot trucks, die at the border. Silence is evil’s best friend.

Speaking out from the relative comfort of my home may not change any realities except one: It changes what I am doing. Ultimately, it changes me.

Viktor Frankl could not undo the Holocaust by the time he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning. But he could bear witness, and he did, thereby giving needed images, memories and models for those of us who came later. He bore witness to the atrocities that are beyond imagination, and to a compassion that was even more stunning.

“We who lived in the concentration camps,” he told us, “can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.”

He bore witness.

In the days that lie before us, we need to bear witness. Trans children and pregnant women are being denied basic medical care. Already, they are dying under the weight of unjust policies. To maintain silence while opioid-fueled lives generate unprecedented rates of suicides and corporate profit; while racism and antisemitism become campaign slogans about crime; while politicians traffick innocent migrants; while poverty consigns our elderly to whimpering deaths – I, for one, need to end my own silence.

In a simple, quiet act, bearing witness means that I will vote. I will exercise the franchise that Republican power brokers want removed from those they fear will “vote the wrong way”: Black and Brown people. Indigenous communities. Democrats. I have only one vote but I have one. 

Meanwhile, I will bear witness. You’re welcome to join me in breaking out of the silence in which so many of us live our worried lives, fearful that the next election cycle will bring a greater loss of freedoms. Join me in speaking out, in lifting the shroud that hides us.

Come, join me, let us joyfully and adamantly bear witness to the truth!

Thirty Years and Counting

Thirty years ago today – August 19, 1992 – I spoke for 13 minutes to the Republican National Convention in Houston, and to audiences around the world. Most of the themes tucked into that speech (“A Whisper of AIDS”) still resonate today: compassion, courage, integrity and honor.

Brent Staples, later known for his brilliant memoir, Parallel Times, was then writing editorials for The New York Times. The piece he filed on my speech was entitled “Teaching Mercy to Republicans.” I still love that title.

“Ms. Fisher took the crusade for decency and compassion into the lion’s den,” wrote Brent.  “She spoke the message to the people who were most in need of hearing it. For that she has earned our gratitude.”

Three decades on, the lion’s den has become meaner. The crusade for decency and compassion amid Republicans has become ever-more absent and necessary. I spoke then as one dying of AIDS. Today, I’d speak as an activist grandmother disgusted by a Party that bows to evil.

But you may judge for yourself. Here’s what I said that hot and humid Wednesday night in the Astrodome:

"A Whisper of 'AIDS'"

Mary D. Fisher

The Republican National Convention

Wednesday, August 19, 1992

Houston, Texas

Less than three months ago, at Platform Hearings in Salt Lake City, I asked the Republican Party to lift the shroud of silence which has been draped over the issue of HIV/AIDS.  I have come tonight to bring our silence to an end.

I bear a message of challenge, not self-congratulation.  I want your attention, not your applause.  I would never have asked to be HIV-positive.  But I believe that in all things there is a good purpose, and so I stand before you, and before the nation, gladly.

The reality of AIDS is brutally clear.  Two hundred thousand Americans are dead or dying; a million more are infected.  Worldwide, forty million, or sixty million, or a hundred million infections will be counted in the coming few years.  But despite science and research, White House meetings and congressional hearings; despite good intentions and bold initiatives, campaign slogans and hopeful promises -- despite it all, it's the epidemic which is winning tonight.

In the context of an election year, I ask you -- here, in this great hall, or listening in the quiet of your home -- to recognize that the AIDS virus is not a political creature.  It does not care whether you are Democrat or Republican. It does not ask whether you are Black or White, male or female, gay or straight, young or old. 

Tonight, I represent an AIDS community whose members have been reluctantly drafted from every segment of American society.  Though I am White, and a mother, I am one with a Black infant struggling with tubes in a Philadelphia hospital.  Though I am female, and contracted this disease in marriage, and enjoy the warm support of my family, I am one with the lonely gay man sheltering a flickering candle from the cold wind of his family's rejection.

This is not a distant threat; it is a present danger.  The rate of infection is increasing fastest among women and children.  Largely unknown a decade ago, AIDS is the third leading killer of young-adult Americans today -- but it won't be third for long.  Because, unlike other diseases, this one travels.  Adolescents don't give each other cancer or heart disease because they believe they are in love.  But HIV is different.  And we have helped it along -- we have killed each other -- with our ignorance, our prejudice, and our silence.   

We may take refuge in our stereotypes, but we cannot hide there long.  Because HIV asks only one thing of those it attacks: Are you human?  And this is the right question: Are you human? 

Because people with HIV have not entered some alien state of being.  They are human.  They have not earned cruelty and they do not deserve meanness.  They don't benefit from being isolated or treated as outcasts.  Each of them is exactly what God made: a person.  Not evil, deserving of our judgment; not victims, longing for our pity.  People.  Ready for support and worthy of compassion.

My call to you, my Party, is to take a public stand no less compassionate than that of the President and Mrs. Bush.  They have embraced me and my family in memorable ways.  In the place of judgment, they have shown affection.  In difficult moments, they have raised our spirits.  In the darkest hours, I have seen them reaching not only to me, but also to my parents, armed with that stunning grief and special grace that comes only to parents who have themselves leaned too long over the bedside of a dying child. 

With the President's leadership, much good has been done; much of the good has gone unheralded; as the President has insisted, "Much remains to be done."

But we do the President's cause no good if we praise the American family but ignore a virus that destroys it.  We must be consistent if we are to be believed.  We cannot love justice and ignore prejudice, love our children and fear to teach them.  Whatever our role, as parent or policy maker, we must act as eloquently as we speak -- else we have no integrity.

My call to the nation is a plea for awareness.  If you believe you are safe, you are in danger.  Because I was not hemophiliac, I was not at risk.  Because I was not gay, I was not at risk.  Because I did not inject drugs, I was not at risk. 

My father has devoted much of his lifetime to guarding against another holocaust.  He is part of the generation who heard Pastor Niemoeller come out of the Nazi death camps to say, "They came after the Jews and I was not a Jew, so I did not protest.  They came after the Trade Unionists, and I was not a Trade Unionist, so I did not protest.  They came after the Roman Catholics, and I was not a Roman Catholic, so I did not protest.  Then they came after me, and there was no one left to protest." 

The lesson history teaches is this: If you believe you are safe, you are at risk.  If you do not see this killer stalking your children, look again.  There is no family or community, no race or religion, no place left in America that is safe.  Until we genuinely embrace this message, we are a nation at risk.

Tonight, HIV marches resolutely toward AIDS in more than a million American homes, littering its pathway with the bodies of the young.  Young men.  Young women.  Young parents.  Young children.  One of the families is mine.  If it is true that HIV inevitably turns to AIDS, then my children will inevitably turn to orphans.

My family has been a rock of support.  My eighty-four-year-old father, who has pursued the healing of the nations, will not accept the premise that he cannot heal his daughter.  My mother has refused to be broken; she still calls at midnight to tell wonderful jokes that make me laugh.  Sisters and friends, and my brother Phillip (whose birthday is today) -- all have helped carry me over the hardest places.  I am blessed, richly and deeply blessed, to have such a family.

But not all of you have been so blessed.  You are HIV-positive but dare not say it.  You have lost loved ones, but you dared not whisper the word AIDS.  You weep silently; you grieve alone. 

I have a message for you: It is not you who should feel shame, it is we.  We who tolerate ignorance and practice prejudice, we who have taught you to fear.  We must lift our shroud of silence, making it safe for you to reach out for compassion.  It is our task to seek safety for our children, not in quiet denial but in effective action. 

Some day our children will be grown.  My son Max, now four, will take the measure of his mother; my son Zachary, now two, will sort through his memories.  I may not be here to hear their judgments, but I know already what I hope they are.

I want my children to know that their mother was not a victim.  She was a messenger.  I do not want them to think, as I once did, that courage is the absence of fear; I want them to know that courage is the strength to act wisely when most we are afraid.  I want them to have the courage to step forward when called by their nation, or their Party, and give leadership -- no matter what the personal cost.  I ask no more of you than I ask of myself, or of my children. 

To the millions of you who are grieving, who are frightened, who have suffered the ravages of AIDS firsthand: Have courage and you will find comfort. 

To the millions who are strong I issue the plea: Set aside prejudice and politics to make room for compassion and sound policy.

To my children, I make this pledge:

I will not give in, Zachary, because I draw my courage from you.  Your silly giggle gives me hope.  Your gentle prayers give me strength.  And you, my child, give me reason to say to America, "You are at risk."

And I will not rest, Max, until I have done all I can to make your world safe.  I will seek a place where intimacy is not the prelude to suffering.

I will not hurry to leave you, my children.  But when I go, I pray that you will not suffer shame on my account. 

To all within sound of my voice, I appeal: Learn with me the lessons of history and of grace, so my children will not be afraid to say the word AIDS when I am gone.  Then their children, and yours, may not need to whisper it at all.

God bless the children, and bless us all -- and good night.