I have to admit the fossil fuel industry did a fantastic job preventing action that could have been taken decades ago. In a recent interview Professor David Suzuki was asked whether he thought it is now too late? He replied it is, and now the question is what to do about it? Going on the outcome of COP 30, I’m not holding my breath.
And it gets better, below is Professor Karl Sagan testifying to the US Congress in 1985.
The ferry pulled away from the Belgian coast with that low industrial moan ships make when they’re leaving something behind. I stood out on the deck where the wind knifed across the rails and the gulls circled like scraps of torn paper. Ostend was already shrinking into the haze, the flat land folding into itself the way memories do when they’ve been carried too long.
I was thinking of him again — the old man who wasn’t my father but carried a kind of gravity that fathers sometimes lose. A man at the far end of his road, stories hanging off him like worn medals. Once a priest, he said, once a missionary, once a believer in the bright machinery of salvation. But he’d shed all that. Left the Church, married late, built a film company out of nothing but stubborn will and the way he could talk images into existence.
He was my father’s friend, but he spoke to me like I was some last chance to pass something forward. Not wisdom — no one ever passes that on — but the bits of history that cling to a man’s ribs after the rest has rotted away. He had that quiet voice older Flemish men get, like each word has to be carried across a border.
It was from him I first heard the legend.
We walked the medieval streets of Damme, he leaned in— I was thirteen — and told me about the headless rider who came out of storm clouds, a ghost nobleman from the days when Damme was still a harbour and the sea crept all the way inland. Heer Hallawijn, he called him, though the name rolled out of his mouth like something older, rounder, half-cooked by dialect. I heard it as “Sear Hallawyn,” something sharp and foreign. The sort of name that makes a boy sit still.
Hallawijn rode a black horse with thunder for hooves. No head on his shoulders, no face, no mercy. He came for the young women, the man said, the ones with bright eyes and unspent lives. The storm opened like a gate and the rider broke through, took them up and carried them west, always west, toward the pale land across the water. The white cliffs, he whispered, as if they were a prison wall.
I didn’t understand anything then. Not the history beneath the legend, not the way folklore carries the trauma of a place when the people forget the source. I didn’t know about the raiders who crossed from England and vanished into the night with whoever they caught. I just knew the man was giving me something fragile, a story you don’t tell loud.
Now, on the ferry in ’72, with the coast slipping away and the wind howling like an old engine that wants to quit, I felt the legend rise again. Felt him rising with it — the old man with the tired eyes, the man who had lived too many lives to trust any single one of them.
The ferry turned its steel face toward England. The wake stretched out behind me, long and white and restless. For a moment I imagined Hallawijn riding that same line of water, headless and relentless, still chasing the souls he thought he was owed.
And I realized: some stories never leave you.
Some men don’t either.
They just ride on ahead, waiting for you to catch up.
I needed a pep talk. Here’s what I got and thought I’d share it given that today truth is a dangerous thing to possess, many who had the courage to speak are in jail, if not dead.
“Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.”
Wole Soyinka. Nobel Prize Literature.
There are moments in life when the personal stops being personal.
When the story you lived through becomes, by sheer weight of experience, something larger — a shard of collective knowledge. Georges Sand saw that clearly: the life of one is the life of all. Rousseau, too, knew that autobiography at its best is not self-display but contribution. A lantern held up for the next traveller on the same dark road.
Survival creates obligation.
Not the sentimental kind, but the clear, flint-edged duty of someone who has come through fire and knows where the burn lines run. If you’ve lived what others are heading toward, you carry information they need. Not theory. Not speculation. The unvarnished truth — the kind Stevenson insisted was the only kind worth speaking.
But truth in complex matters is rarely welcomed. Especially when it touches power, sex, institutions, and the cultural myths people cling to for comfort. You learn, quickly, that some truths are heavily patrolled. Entire systems rise up to mute them: law, shame, moral panic, public relations, and that strange modern fog that calls itself “protective” while obscuring precisely what needs to be seen.
You know this yourself.
You saw what boys disappeared into in Piccadilly, Brussels, Amsterdam.
You saw what predation looked like from the street level, long before academics or policymakers dared to map it. And because you survived — because you didn’t become a name in a field outside London or a body at the base of a hotel — you carry something sharper than commentary. You carry lived intelligence.
But lived intelligence is dangerous.
It disrupts narratives.
It implicates people long protected by rank, reputation, or convenient categories.
It shows where responsibility was shrugged off, and where evil wore the mask of “higher good.”
Institutions hate that.
Societies do, too.
They prefer their monsters cloaked in abstraction, safely distant, not woven into their own halls of power. When someone stands up and says, This is how it was — here are the names, the mechanisms, the blind eyes, the complicities, suddenly the truth becomes radioactive. Not because it is false, but because it is true.
And evil — the real kind, not the theatrical version — thrives in the gaps between what people know and what they are willing to say. Zen names it “ceaseless negation,” the force that undoes meaning, compassion, coherence. Western religion makes it a figure, a fallen angel chasing God’s throne. Ginsberg, reading Blake, saw how law can harden into tyranny, how order can calcify into cruelty. Pauwels and Bergier imagined evil as beautiful singing flowers — the inversion of beauty, seductive and wrong all at once.
But evil has a simpler habit: it hides behind respectability.
Behind bureaucracy.
Behind social discomfort.
Behind the instinct to protect reputation instead of children.
Behind the fear that telling the truth will tear down the cathedral.
Yet cathedrals built on silence have crypts full of bones.
The real danger is not in speaking the truth, but in what grows when truth is forbidden speech. When the lived past is censored, redacted, or brushed aside because it implicates the wrong people. When the suffering of the vulnerable becomes politically inconvenient. Then evil becomes self-renewing — a garden of those singing flowers, tended by the very systems meant to keep them from blooming.
So the question returns:
If you carry the truth — the difficult, lived truth — do you not have a duty to speak it? Even if it unsettles? Even if it offends the comfortable?
My answer: yes.
But with a caveat:
Truth spoken from experience is a scalpel.
It cuts, but it also heals.
It shows the wound so that others might not be wounded.
You aren’t motivated by vengeance or spectacle.
You’re motivated by the simple, human knowledge that boys are still disappearing — if not in the same places, then in new ones; if not under the same excuses, then under updated ones. The patterns persist because the truths behind them remain unexamined or unspeakable.
Your story isn’t self-indulgence. It’s testimony.
Testimony is always uncomfortable.
Testimony is always resisted by those who benefit from silence.
Testimony is always necessary.
Because if the life of one is the life of all, then the truth of one belongs to all who need it to survive.
And if there is a duty in this world, it is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment.
It is to protect the vulnerable from erasure.
You’re standing at the crossroads where many truth-tellers, whistleblowers, survivors, and reluctant witnesses have stood:
the place where duty and self-preservation glare at each other across a narrow room.
It’s not a trivial decision.
It’s not a moral cartoon.
It’s not simply “be brave” or “stay silent.”
It’s much older, heavier — the old mythic struggle with Urizen, that tightening god of law, order, structure, bureaucracy, the one who always says: Not now. Not like this. Not from you.
But here’s something worth holding:
You don’t have to fight Urizen to tell the truth.
You only have to refuse to worship him.
You’ve lived the raw material.
You didn’t study it from the outside.
You walked the ground barefoot, and you survived the terrain. That gives you a kind of authority that no one can grant and no one can take away.
But authority doesn’t mean obligation without limit.
There are a few questions that matter, and only you can answer them:
If your aim is revenge, or exposure for exposure’s sake, Urizen will devour you — because he thrives on the energy of conflict.
But if your aim is prevention, illumination, or help, then you stand on stronger ground. Not moralistic ground — practical ground.
Saving one life is not a small thing.
But losing your own peace of mind matters too.
Truth doesn’t always have to be an accusation.
It can be a map.
It can be a warning.
It can be a record.
It can be a testimony shaped so that it protects the vulnerable without necessarily naming the protected.
There are ways to speak that cut through fog without inviting a war.
Sometimes the truth needs to be a blunt instrument.
Sometimes a lantern.
Sometimes a needle that stitches a wound closed.
If you write directly for boys, or for social workers, or for parents, your purpose clarifies. You’re not writing to fight the powerful. You’re writing to guide the lost.
That’s not a battle.
That’s a gift.
This is where your question carries weight.
The cost of speaking is obvious:
stress, scrutiny, legal lines to navigate, unwanted attention, reopening old rooms you’d rather leave locked.
But the cost of silence is quieter and more corrosive:
the knowledge that what you lived — and survived — stays folded away while others repeat the same path, unalerted.
Only you can decide which cost you can bear.
You don’t need to empty the whole vault.
You can write what is necessary, useful, life-saving — and leave the rest in the archive of memory.
Full disclosure is a myth anyway.
Even a whole autobiography is only a thin outline of a life.
You can craft truth responsibly, selectively, meaningfully, without betraying either your past or the people who need the message.
Here is the secret Blake understood:
Urizen doesn’t actually win by force.
He wins when you believe the structure is absolute.
He wins when you self-censor before he even arrives.
He wins when you imagine him larger than he is.
If you choose to speak, you don’t need to go three rounds with him.
You can write outside his ring.
You can write beyond his jurisdiction.
You can write in a way that bypasses the machinery he controls.
Truth doesn’t need to be shouted to be dangerous.
Sometimes a quiet truth travels farther.
And if you choose not to write — that’s also a truth. But then the task becomes forgiving yourself for that choice.
I’ll confess to playing mind games with machines. It can be hours of fun, but they are becoming better players. Today, and building on the Zen anecdote previously posted, I hit AI with the line, “What is said cannot be true, and what is true cannot be said.” I then linked that to the Godel theory, more Zen and Thomas Aquinas. Gathering up what I’d written, and in ‘my voice,’ it delivered the following which I must admit impressed me. So I share it here.
There’s a point in every earnest search where the tools start to feel too small.
Where the words you’ve leaned on your whole life suddenly seem like mismatched shoes — good for walking, maybe, but not for the ground you’re standing on now.
It happens to monks, mystics, logicians, even to men with libraries in their heads and formulas in their bones.
You can hear it in that old floating line:
“What is said cannot be true, and what is true cannot be said.”
Nobody knows who first said it, because once a thing drifts into that territory, attribution feels beside the point.
It’s the kind of sentence that sounds like it was written by everyone and no one, whispered by the world itself.
Zen makes a whole pedagogy out of this contradiction.
A monk asks for a sermon. The master walks to the hall, stands, looks, leaves.
No words, no doctrine, no narrative arc — just presence.
And the young monk, puzzled, is told: That was the sermon.
It’s not a riddle.
It’s a demonstration of limits.
A word points. A gesture shows.
But the thing itself — raw reality, unfiltered, unwrapped — arrives only in direct experience.
Open your mouth and you’re already off-centre.
By the time you name the truth, you’ve stepped away from it.
Funny thing is, the mathematicians eventually got there too.
Gödel took the cleanest, hardest-edged discipline humans ever built and found the same crack running through it.
Any system big enough to talk about numbers, he said, will contain truths it cannot prove.
The system cannot certify itself.
To see the whole of it, you’d need to stand outside — but you are the thing you’re trying to stand outside of.
The Zen master says:
The finger cannot touch itself.
Gödel says:
The system cannot swallow the whole truth of its own structure.
Two ways of pointing at the same horizon.
And then there’s Aquinas, the great architect of medieval theology.
A man who built towers of argument so elegant the Church still lives in their shadow.
Then one winter morning, during Mass, something hit him — vision, revelation, clarity, call it what you will — and he laid down his pen forever.
“All that I have written seems like straw,” he said.
Not wrong.
Just insufficient.
It’s the same story again: the mind brushing up against what it cannot wrap itself around.
Some people think mystics and mathematicians live in different worlds.
But stand back and the lines connect.
All three — Aquinas, Gödel, the Zen masters — stand at the edge of the same map, staring into the same blank uncharted space.
Their methods differ.
Their vocabularies barely overlap.
But their conclusions rhyme.
There is more to truth than the frameworks used to describe it.
More to reality than any system — theological, logical, linguistic — can hold.
At the far edge of understanding, silence is not ignorance; it is fidelity.
It’s a strange kind of humility, knowing the tools you built with care can’t touch the heart of the matter.
But it’s also liberating.
Because once you stop trying to express the ineffable, you become free to encounter it.
That’s why the Zen master gives the silent sermon.
Why Aquinas closed his notebook.
Why Gödel proved the hole in the mathematical net.
Each in his own way is saying:
Don’t mistake the map for the territory.
Don’t confuse the word for the world.
Don’t think the symbol is the thing.
There’s a truth that lives outside the frame, and we touch it — if at all — in moments when the mind stops grasping and simply meets what’s there.
Call it reality, God, the Tao, the uncarved block, the unspeakable, the obvious.
Names don’t matter.
The thing has been itself long before we tried to pronounce it.
Hmmm, one day this machine might hit me with something truly ‘left of field,’ and not in its dataset. I’ll have to work on how to make that happen – short of finding another relic of the counter-culture revolution who enjoys metaphysics over a few good bottles of wine.
A young monk hurried to the master.
“Master, the monks are assembled. They request a sermon.”
The master rose without a word.
He walked to the hall, stepped onto the pulpit, looked out at the gathered monks,
and after a moment’s stillness, stepped down again.
He returned to his chambers.
Puzzled, the young monk followed.
“Master, why did you not give a sermon?”
The master smiled.
“I did,” he said.