As we recall, Meryl Streep used her Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement speech at last month’s Golden Globes as an avenue through which to call out President Trump. (And then he called her overrated because of course he did.)
However, you likely missed Streep responding to his words because you were watching the Grammys. (It’s fine. So was I.)
At the Human Rights Campaign’s 2017 Greater New York Dinner, Meryl joked that she is “the most overrated, over-decorated and currently, over-berated actress . . . of my generation.” But then she added something more.
“If we live through this precarious moment,” she continued. “If his catastrophic instinct to retaliate doesn’t lead us to nuclear winter, we will have much to thank this president for because he will have woken us up to how fragile freedom really is. The whip of the Executive can, through a Twitter feed, lash and intimidate, punish and humiliate, delegitimize the press and imagined enemies with spasmodic regularity and easily provoked predictability.”
“Evil prospers when good men do nothing,” Streep then said, quoting Edmund Burke.
Which, well, duh. But as we venture further into this highly-politicized era, the time to say something (anything) matters more and more. Platforms exist so that we can bring attention to rights, wrongs, and everything in-between — or better: elevate the words of someone who might be able to say something better than we can. And that’s something you can say the next time anybody tells you they don’t know what to say about whatever-it-is you’re talking about — because we’re surrounded by a shit-ton of great thinkers who know exactly how to put important points into words, and platforms can exist simply to help get their words out there.
