It's Always Darkest Before the Dawn

I'll always remember what you said, Pah.

When I was a little boy, my family made regular weekend trips to visit my grandparents. It’s a quaint cultural practice that feels like a distant relic in the age of FaceTime—especially in the nomadic professional class in which I operate. But circumstances have sent my thoughts back to those simpler times. And in doing so, they have stirred up memories within me.

There are signposts in my life that stand out—things people said to me, experiences I had—totem poles upon which my sense of identity and relationship with the world are affixed.

Jack Dorsey once told me I needed to listen more. He learned to listen because of a speech impediment. I learned to listen because my grandfather made me. And maybe that advice was right—there’s wisdom in knowing when to stay quiet. But there’s also a time to speak. And a time to refuse silence.

On those weekend trips to my father’s parents, when my grandfather was still alive, I would sit with him at the kitchen table, and he would tell me stories about the war. I’d drink the sugary sodas that our parents and grandparents in working-class Canada gave us too much of. But one memory stands as a totem.

One Sunday afternoon, as we waited for the roast beef to finish cooking—a smell I miss so much—my grandfather told me about the people he knew who never came home from the war. He was there on D-Day, you see. Along with thousands of Allied forces: Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, partisans of the Polish and French resistance, and Canadians. My grandfather was never cynical about being sent to that beach. In fact, he volunteered.

Long after he passed, I looked up his enlistment records at the National Archives in Ottawa. I remember staring into the blown-up projection of the microfiche, trying to imagine what could motivate my grandfather to so willingly send himself to war. But I understand now.

The sense of something that matters so deeply to me—democracy—is being dismantled in ways I can’t imagine my grandfather being able to view with the detachment I now see in so many of my fellow Americans. The slow deletion of democracy isn’t happening with tanks and gunfire—it’s happening with AI models, with bureaucratic purges, with quiet, calculated erasures of oversight and accountability.

Because that totem pole, the one that has stuck with me my entire life, was when my grandfather—his health already declining as diabetes slowly took its toll—turned to me and said:

“I want you to listen to me very carefully. You can never—ever—forget the sacrifice of those people who never came home from that war. Don’t let your children forget it. And don’t let their children forget it.”

When we would observe the moments of silence before the war epitaphs on November 11th, I’d hear his voice—“don’t forget.” And I haven’t forgotten.

I won’t forget, Pah. That’s what I called him.

The last few days have been difficult for me. The hardest part has been friends—people I thought I knew—turning away. Some have tried to counsel me into silence. Some because they genuinely don’t see what all the fuss is about and wonder what I’m smoking. Some because they do see what’s happening, but they are making peace with it, and they don’t want anything to do with the trouble I’m trying to stir up.

My grandfather’s generation crossed an ocean and walked into gunfire for democracy.

I can’t even get some of my friends to send a goddamn tweet.

Moments like this show you who people are—whether they are brave, or whether they are cowards. Some, I’m realizing, were just wayward opportunists all along.

The coming days will almost certainly get harder. More people, in the confusion and their inability to grasp what is happening, will decide they just want to “go along to get along.”

But I can’t do that.

Because I remember what you told me, Pah.

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In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

    That mark our place; and in the sky

    The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

    Loved and were loved, and now we lie

        In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe: 

To you from failing hands we throw

    The torch; be yours to hold it high. 

    If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

        In Flanders fields.

— John McCrae.