* William Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” Act II, Scene 1.

Once again, my old friend Will Shakespeare comes to my rescue when I find myself groping for exactly the right words.

What brought this particular quotation to mind was a reprint of a news broadcast on March 9, 1954, by the late (and truly great) Edward R. Murrow on his CBS-TV “See It Now” program. At the time, Murrow was commenting on the notorious McCarthy hearings then underway in Congress: Senator Joseph McCarthy’s paranoid, destructive, one-man crusade to root out, by any means, every last communist — real or imagined — in the United States.

As so often happens throughout history, Murrow’s warning of 71 years ago has proven to be as germane in the context of today’s political climate as it was during the “Red Scare” of the 1950s:

“We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”

And that is precisely what we are doing when we smugly focus on condemning foreign despots while allowing our own freedoms to be stripped away, one after another after another, by a cabal of home-grown autocrats.

The journalists of the last century — Murrow, Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, Brokaw, Woodward and Bernstein — were voices of truth and reason, often our moral compasses. They were fearless, outspoken, and respected.

We need voices like theirs now, more than ever — not only in the media, but in government, in our institutions of learning and culture, in our neighborhoods . . . everywhere.

We need to keep the voices sounding.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
7/10/25