The Curtain Must Fall
By Harry Turner
The curtain must fall.
I apologize in advance. You see, I don’t want to be a preacher. I don’t want to be a prophet. I am simply a man, a soul, just like you. But some truths won’t leave you alone until you give them a voice. And so I stand here, not as a critic, but as a man who knows the historical consequences of silence.
We have been sold a performance, taught to prize the exterior, the appearance, while neglecting the interior. We’ve mistaken loudness for leadership, appearance for authority, and influence for integrity. But charisma without character is a counterfeit light. It blinds, but it does not illuminate.
They dressed us up in labels. Told us who to be, what to believe. Look good, sound right, fit in, win. And so we put on our masks. We filtered our faces and filtered our feelings. We sacrificed substance for spectacle, and the price was our peace.
You see, beneath the surface of this culture, something sacred is dying. It is not religion. Nor is it tradition. Nor is it patriotism. It is conscience. It is a still, small voice that whispers, “This is not who we are.” And we’ve muted it, because listening would mean changing.
But our present circumstances have led us to the point where we must now listen, before the noise becomes deafening, before the illusion is adopted as our identity, before the children of the future inherit not a dream, but a façade.
America is not perishing from outside threats. She is crumbling from within, from the corrosion of character, from the slow erosion of truth, from a people more loyal to their party than to their principles, more invested in being right than being real, or aligned with truth.
But listen. Hear me out. This is not a speech of despair. If you feel like I feel, you know this is the trumpet of awakening, because there is still time.
Time to stop clinging to the collapsing scaffolding of the false self. Time to strip away the masks, not to shame, but to liberate. Time to stop asking, “What will they think of me?” and begin asking, “Who am I when no one else is watching?”
Let me tell you, just in case you require a little bit of guidance. You are not your platform. You are not your past. You are not your pain. You are not your profile, your position, or your performance.
You are endowed with immeasurable dignity. You are a temple of the eternal. You are a carrier of conscience, a vessel of the divine. And this... this moment right here... is your invitation to return. To return to truth. To return to love. To return to integrity, which is the courage to align your inner world with your outer life.
As the great James Baldwin once stated, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Do not wait for a movement to rescue you. You are the movement, not by force, but by presence, not with pride, but with humility, not with a sword, but with a mirror. Hold it up, look closely, and then live accordingly.
When I say we must move beyond the façade, this is not a condemnation. As Carl Jung once stated, “Condemnation does not liberate. It oppresses.” What this is, is a confession. It is a call. It is the uncomfortable truth that we’ve all felt but dared not say out loud... we are tired of pretending.
We are tired of chasing applause in a world that forgot how to listen. We are tired of climbing ladders that lead nowhere. We are tired of worshiping images while starving for intimacy. And so, the time has come to unplug from performance, to reclaim our personhood, and to build again... but this time, from the inside out.
Yes, the curtain must fall. Yes, the stage must burn. But not in vain. In the ashes, something real will rise.
As a great soul once said, by the name of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Let us be the ones who lit the fire, not to destroy, but to purify, not to shame, but to awaken, not to end the show, but to start a new story. One told not in filters and facades, but in truth, in tears, in transformation.
Let us no longer be actors. Let us be human. Let us be whole. And let us be free.
