The Whisper and the Wall

I remember hearing someone say, “Never come between a man and his means of survival.” Whether it was on TV or in a bar somewhere, I remember not. However, the words landed like folklore, half warning, half prophecy. I didn’t understand it then. Not really; it just felt like someone was defending their turf.

Now, I understand.

I see it in the eyes of friends who used to be outspoken, now calculating every word before they speak. I feel it in the tightening of my own throat during meetings where the Truth feels unwelcome. I hear it in the way professionals, good people, sign off on policies that quietly betray everything they believe in, just to keep their seats at the table.

There is a wall. A thick, invisible wall between what we believe and what we practice. Between who we are and what we do to stay afloat.

It’s not because people are evil; it’s because the rent is due. The kids need school fees. The emails keep coming.

Somewhere along the way, survival stopped being sacred and became a leash. A daily script. A quiet war. A full-time performance.

We smile. We nod. We play nice.

Because honesty rarely pays and, Truth doesn’t sponsor conferences.

But here’s the thing: There’s a whisper, that small voice that makes you blink a hundred times before giving that professionally engineered speech. You know the voice I mean, that one that wakes you at 3 a.m. quietly asking, “What have you become?”.

It’s that shiver that runs through your spine when someone else dares to say what you’ve been swallowing. It doesn’t yell, it doesn’t storm.

It just refuses to die, and it makes you shake your head in denial when no one has spoken a word.

That whisper is your conscience.

That whisper is who you were before the compromises. Before the rebranding. Before commodification of your soul. Before “professionalism” became the mask you wore even in your own mirror.

If there’s comfort in numbers, then good news: it’s not just you.

Many are caught in this hush economy, where silence is profitable, where obedience is more secure than integrity.

Even in our justice spaces, the whisper is muffled.

Anger is edited. Grief is packaged. Donor-approved. Market-tested. We speak in tones that won’t scare the funders. We write proposals that hide the Truth in footnotes. We turn protest into performance, then ask for retweets.

Then we wonder why our spirits feel hollow, a feeling that is quickly drowned in a bottle, televised sports, or doom-scrolling.

Let’s be honest:

Money has become our moral ceiling. We’re now up for “what works”, calling truth “impractical” and compliance “maturity.” We often confuse silence with wisdom and survival with success.

But...

Surviving for too long on someone else’s terms can make you forget your own.

And that forgetfulness is not a blip; it’s a crisis.

A quiet, continent-wide forgetting.

We need more than clever slogans.

We need the courage to name the wall. And the trust to listen to the whisper. Because the wall is fear, the whisper is Truth.

And the future, quite honestly, will depend on which one we choose to follow as a people!