Oppressive regimes, governments, religions and family systems rely on silence to fester and thrive. Their weak and parasitic exoskeleton depends on a steady supply of hapless victims who either helplessly, unknowingly, or willingly remain within the walls, feeding the gluttonously engorged heart with stolen blood and soul.

The helpless are those who are sucked into the depths of disempowerment and servitude, sieved from the opportunistic chasms cleaved from instabilities festering long before they stumbled into the snare. The unknowing have perhaps been lured by the shiny and deadly pinpoint of false promises and the glint of hope stabbing through the murky depths of existence when all other hope is seemingly lost.

The willing are those who see the fangs, the claws still befouled with shreds of innocent flesh, the poison metastasizing with fetid and insidious intent, and are sick with envy at those who wring the life and essence out of those who seem weaker.

Silence feeds these malignant ecosystems, today as it has throughout human existence. Silence is the price of admission.

My childhood was cloaked in tyrannical silence. In the cult within which I was raised for 18 years, five times a week I was indoctrinated, along with scores of modestly dressed women and girls, with the contemptuous and fear-tinged admonition that women must remain silent. Scores of scriptures from the Bible were hurled at us from the podium by male Elders, proving that blameless men, holy prophets, and God himself needed us females to shut the hell up lest we ensnare them with our unholy, deceptive, and treacherous words. Along with our bodies and our minds, our voices were at the top of the list of things that would corrupt men if left unfettered.

In my childhood home, only my father’s voice was allowed. He dominated the house with his impossible expectations, long-winded harangues, and quiveringly venomous hostility, couched in unfounded accusations that escalated into terrifying aggression whenever one of us non-males in the house would venture to use our voice to disagree with him or defend ourselves.

We girls learned that speaking was a labyrinth of unavoidable booby traps, and unwillingly muted our opinions, suppressed our needs and feelings, and locked down our thoughts and essence into shallow and unthreatening shadows of who we really were. We learned to fear our own voices.

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My fifth-grade classmate who wore long sleeves in the hottest summer sunshine, and whose fingernails were permanently deformed into mangled triangles, whispered to me on the playground that her grandmother had deliberately crushed her hands with their heavy 1970s car trunk when she was even littler. I whispered back, showing her the black and blue welts on my legs with edges of dried blood left by my father’s rough-edged leather belt.

We both knew better than to speak out loud about any of this, particularly to the adults in our lives — even the teachers, who surely saw this child’s disfigured fingers, and my black eye, and the excessive and constant marks on me from the endless beatings I endured during my childhood — and who said nothing.

However horrific and callous this sounds and feels in 2024, silence was a legally endorsed, shruggingly accepted reality for children and women and anyone who was not a moderately well-to-do white male up until fairly recently. Women were not allowed to open a credit card in their own name in the United States until 1974. Before that year, men used legal financial control to ensure that their own voices drowned out the needs and safety of women — a power dynamic deemed necessary by men, due to the unspoken knowledge shared by them that women, when given the option to speak up with words and action, more likely than not will choose lives that allow themselves to inflate their lungs and speak with resonating clarity against weaponized suppression.

As women and children’s voices have been amplified and grudgingly allowed to take up space where traditionally only men have held court with unchallenged and self-serving authority, a panic has taken hold. Much like the relentless and virulent backlash from the appallingly underwhelming suggestion that Black Americans should merely be allowed to have a seat at the table that they themselves were forced to build, a frightening and aggressively malignant resurgence of weaponized silence has metastasized into our current reality.

A long-winded, pompous man who gleefully blares about all the ways in which he ignored, diminished, and silenced women throughout his life, and who whips to a frenzy of eager complicity a viscous slick of repugnant sycophants who have been driven to tears of impotent frustration by the upswelling of remorseless and unflattering truth, is waiting for his chance to fulfill the most potent vow he holds most dear: to forever silence those who make him feel small by speaking up and speaking out.

And so the question is for us all: Do you fear speaking up more than you fear being silenced for good? Do you respect your fear more than yourself? Will you speak out with your voice, your vote, your unapologetic and from-your-chest defiance of those who rely on silence to maintain their own power, their own flattering self-image, and of those who flock to gobble up the crumbs of imagined camaraderie (not knowing that everything tainted by silence is in the Exclusion Zone, and therefore uninhabitable by all.)

“My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” — Audre Lorde

Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton. She writes a monthly column.