The Secret City’s Legacy: When Silence Becomes Survival

When the Government Asks You to Unsee What You Saw

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“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” —George Orwell

Flickr Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, TN

Dear friends, you know I do not write about politics but I don’t want to act as if everything is normal in our country because it’s not. We’re heading to a dictatorship and we must stop it or lose our constitution.

I’ve been distraught about the murder of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, innocent protestors in Minneapolis. I know people who live there and they are telling me the children in the city are afraid of going to school and that immigrant neighbors are afraid to leave their houses.

I watched a Alex Pretti Shooting: “This is a Turning Point” | Pivot - with Tara Swisher and Scott Galloway. At the end of the video, Scott talks about how important it is that we stop spending for a week to make our voices heard in addition to keep peacefully protesting. I do think that impacting the stock market or the GDP will cause politicians to listen to us.

Citizens can significantly impact Gross Domestic Product (GDP) through their daily economic activities especially individual actions—specifically consumption, labor, and investment—collectively drive the majority of economic growth. I hope that a non-profit organization will set this up so we can stop spending for a few days or weeks to let the government know we want to stop ICE from invading our cities. Your thoughts? Write a comment below.

1940s Manhattan Project Oak Ridge

I grew up in a city so secret it wasn’t on a map until I was seven years old. Oak Ridge, Tennessee—where part of the atomic bomb was made in the 1940s—was a place where silence wasn’t just golden, it was mandatory.

Rumor had it that one in four people was an FBI informant. Women hanging laundry on clotheslines could be turned in for simply talking to each other. The entire community lived within barbed wire fences, passing through seven Army guard gates. Soldiers boarded buses to check passes. Citizens received free provisions in exchange for their civil liberties—and their voices.

My father couldn’t tell us what he did for work. Not without risking treason charges. Reading about early Oak Ridge feels like living inside a George Orwell novel—except it was my childhood.

When Silence Becomes Character

I didn’t realize until last year how deeply that culture had shaped me. Reviewing my life, I saw a pattern: every moment of profound suffering traced back to not communicating hard things.

A love I couldn’t tell I needed more commitment from—we broke up and I grieved for five years. A cherished friendship where neither of us could name what was wrong—we were estranged for a decade until my son’s medical crisis brought her back. She stayed through his surgery, and years later we finally talked about what had happened between us.

I’d learned early: If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it. It made me pleasant. It also made me silent when truth-telling mattered most.

The Gaslighting Continues

We’re watching it happen again in real time.

We saw footage of Alex Pretti—a peaceful protester murdered by ICE and Border Patrol officers in Minneapolis. We watched it with our own eyes. And now the government calls him “an agitator.” They’re asking us to unsee what we saw, to accept the official narrative over witnessed reality.

This is Orwell’s insight made flesh: making murder respectable, giving pure wind the appearance of solidity.

The mechanism is the same whether it’s a secret city behind barbed wire or a government rewriting yesterday’s violence. Both require our silence. Both depend on us not talking about the hard thing we all know is true.

Breaking the Pattern

I’m learning—slowly, imperfectly—that my silence protects no one. Not me, not the people I love, not the truth.

The legacy of Oak Ridge taught me that silence equals safety. But that was always a lie. Silence equals suffering—mine and everyone else’s who needs someone to say what we’re all seeing.

So I’m practicing: saying the hard thing, naming what’s uncomfortable, refusing to make murder respectable with my complicity.

Because if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

How do you feel about what’s happening right now? You know I love hearing from you.

XO, Sherold