The PR Blog

There are moments in history when telling the truth plainly becomes dangerous -  not because the truth has changed, but because power has decided it must be controlled.

We like to believe those moments belong to distant lands or darker eras, ruled by uniforms and jackboots. Yet they have a habit of returning dressed in softer language, justified by good intentions, and enforced not with rifles but regulations. When authorities begin deciding what may be said “for the common good,” truth does not vanish. It adapts. It learns to move quietly. It hides.

America learned this lesson during World War II, when one of its most decisive weapons was not forged from steel, but from language.

In 1942, as the war in the Pacific raged and Japanese codebreakers proved alarmingly adept, the United States turned to an unlikely solution: young Navajo Marines, speaking an ancient, complex language that outsiders neither understood nor respected.

As a child, we spent our Christmas holidays at a remote coastal sheep farm in New Zealand. We didn’t know those moments were precious at the time. We only know now, because they are rarer.

The memories that made us were not accidents. They were given -  by parents, communities, and a world that allowed time to linger. If we want the next generation to stand firm, they will need memories of their own to stand on.

A culture that no longer remembers how it grew struggles to know what it should protect.

And so I found myself heading down memory lane to a time that I still cherish over 60 years later. 

From Dusty Gulch Part One of the Honklanistan Series 
By Roderick (Whiskers) McNibble

Dusty Gulch has always prided itself on being hard to surprise.

It has survived droughts, dubious leadership initiatives, interpretive art installations, and at least three “temporary” committees that never went away. Yet even by local standards, the recent arrival of Honklans from the desert realm of Hoklanistan has been… noticeable.

The Honklans first appeared following the invitation of Prentis Penjani, who described the initial Pigoose hybrid as “a cultural ambassador with excellent posture.” At the time, few suspected that one bird would soon become many.

When the bonds that hold us together are tested, the cost is often borne in the very divisions we seek to overcome.

I recently watched a film called United, based on the true and tragic story of the Manchester United team lost in the Munich air disaster of 1958. It is a story many people think they know - young men, enormous promise, sudden catastrophe -  but what struck me was not the crash itself. It was what followed.

In the aftermath of tragedy, Manchester United rebuilt not through optimism, but through unity of purpose. Today, in a world where everything has become political and division is quietly encouraged, that lesson feels more confronting than ever. This New Year, the question is not whether we agree -  but whether we are still willing to stand together.

Those who survived did not rebuild because they were cheerful, or optimistic, or untouched by grief. They rebuilt because they understood something that seems almost foreign to us now: that when loss comes -  and it always does - the only way forward is together.

That is what makes the film so confronting today.

Because we are not united.

Leonard Cohen once said, “I’ve seen the future, brother: it is murder.”

For a long time, we treated that as poetry. Or atmosphere. Or a warning meant for some other century.

But Cohen was never vague about the future. He didn’t predict gadgets or machines. He predicted the erosion of the soul. He was writing about what happens when efficiency outruns wisdom, when intimacy is replaced by management, when systems become more important than people.

What we are building now would not have surprised him. AI.

Artificial intelligence did not arrive as a conqueror. It arrived as a helper. It learned our language, anticipated our needs, smoothed friction, saved time. It offered answers before we had finished asking the question.

That is how power has always entered the room.