The More We Bury the Truth
The more we bury the truth, the deeper the innocent are buried with it.
It's easy to look back at history and wonder how ordinary people failed to see what was happening.
How could whole towns live in the shadow of barbed wire and later say they knew nothing?
After the Second World War, Allied forces marched German civilians through the concentration camps. Ordinary men and women - bakers, schoolteachers, shopkeepers - were made to walk past piles of bodies, to smell the stench of death, to see the emaciated survivors, and to confront the consequences of evil that had been allowed to grow in plain sight.
It was a reckoning.
Not only for those who committed the crimes, but for those who chose not to ask difficult questions.
History's lesson is not simply that terrible things happen. It is that terrible things can flourish when societies become comfortable looking away.
Perhaps that lesson is as important today as it has ever been.
No, we are not living through another Holocaust. History should never be cheapened by careless comparisons. But we are living in an age where uncomfortable truths are too often buried beneath bureaucracy, public relations, ideology, and fear of causing offence.
We've seen abuse hidden within churches, schools, sporting organisations and care homes. We've seen corruption concealed behind polished podiums. We've watched inquiries delayed, reports sanitised, whistleblowers dismissed and victims told to remain silent for the greater good.
Every generation tells itself the same comforting story:
"Don't make trouble."
"It will damage reputations."
"What will the neighbours think?"
But trying to bury the truth never makes it disappear.
It simply gives it deeper roots.
Burying corruption is itself a form of corruption.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower understood why truth mattered. After visiting a concentration camp in April 1945, he wrote:
“The things I saw beggar description…
…The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick.I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations to propaganda.”
- General Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 15, 1945
He understood something profoundly important.
If people refuse to face reality, eventually reality is dismissed as propaganda.
Shielding people from uncomfortable truths isn't kindness.
It's cowardice.
It creates a society living inside a padded room while convincing itself it is free.
Truth, however painful, remains the only way out.
We speak endlessly of reconciliation, inclusion and justice.
But what justice is it that asks children to carry burdens they never created? What kind of society sends toddlers into institutional care for forty or more hours each week and calls that nurturing? What nation increasingly places children at the centre of adult political and cultural battles before they are old enough to understand them?
We have turned so many things upside down.
And somehow, it is almost always the children who pay the price.
They inherit our fears.
They carry our unresolved conflicts.
They become unwilling participants in arguments they never asked to join.
Who is asking how they feel?
Who is protecting their right simply to be children?
We say we care about safeguarding the future.
Perhaps the first step is far simpler.
Stop burying the truth.
Let the Light in.
Stop asking the innocent to bear the cost of adult failures.
Leonard Cohen captured something profound in his song Anthem: the image of light entering through a crack. It is a reminder that truth rarely arrives through perfection. More often, it breaks through where the façade has already begun to fail.
We have spent too long papering over the fissures - pretending that scandals within our institutions, the erosion of childhood, and the quiet enabling of harm are merely imperfections to be managed, rebranded or forgotten. Yet it is often within those very cracks that deeper problems are revealed.
Letting the light in means refusing the padded comfort of silence. It means being willing to confront uncomfortable realities, however painful they may be. Truth does not always arrive as reassurance. It often arrives as a fracture that humbles us, exposing what we would rather leave hidden and demanding an honest reckoning.
Only then can something worthy be rebuilt. Only then can the innocent - the child clutching a teddy bear, the vulnerable who depend upon the courage of others - be spared from carrying the burden of our silence.
The cracks are not the end of the story.
They are where the light begins to enter.
And let children remain exactly what they were born to be:
Innocent.
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