Illiteracy is rampant. People are out of communication.
Karen Black
Illiteracy is rampant, and somewhere along the way, people have mistaken constant noise for communication. We are modern enough to afford the luxury of aloofness, yet many stand in complete despair, despondent, disconnected, and unsure how to speak across the fracture.
There is strange fruit decaying in the wallows of life, and too often, we call it truce because naming the wound would require responsibility. Hope, once as delicate as a nightingale, disperses into thin air while we continue to cherish what has already fallen from the tree. Even the bark of the peach tree seems to search for shade and love in the in-between hour of summer, when beauty and collapse stand beside each other without explanation.
When things fall apart, time does not always arrive as punishment. Sometimes it comes as remediation. Sometimes it asks us to examine the interior life of a person, a group, and a nation with the same seriousness as an annual checkup. What has gone untreated? What have we normalized? What infection has entered the bloodstream of our conversations?
Have we surrendered to the liberty of a directionless society? Have we chosen instant gratification, immediate responses, and the convenience of speed over the wisdom of delayed satisfaction? We glance at the poetics of life and wonder what Emerson, Baldwin, Langston, and Churchill might say about a world so distracted by its own desires that it has forgotten how to think without interruption.
As Churchill splendidly alludes, “without tradition, art loses its shepherd. Without innovation, it becomes a corpse.” The same is true of society. Leadership requires more than performance. It asks for sanctity, courage, and the ability to hold responsibility without appeasing mediocrity. Yet too often, we feed the crocodile and hope it eats us last.
This is the danger of belligerence dressed as strength and passivity dressed as peace. If mediocrity becomes the measure of society, what will the generations after us inherit? Will they know the difference between intelligence and imbecility? Between disagreement and disrespect? Between debate and destruction?
Let this be a warning and a prayer. May the false ideologies lie to rest. May we return to civil conversation, stimulating debate, and respect for one another. May we learn how to hold an opinion without spilling our spirit as though a gun has been pointed at the throat of thought.
Brilliance is sharpened when it is challenged. The mind becomes clearer when it is questioned. There is beauty in difference when difference is not treated as war.
Let this moment be a testament to time. Let us be remembered not for how loudly we defended certainty, but for how bravely we returned to thought, dignity, and the sacred art of conversation.
-Sherley
© 2026 Sherley Delia. All rights reserved.
Healing Majestically 