How Many Times Can a Man Turn His Head?

By Joe Broadmeadow

“Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn’t see?”

— Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind”

---

Twenty years carrying a badge taught me that the most useful witness and the most useless one are often the same person. They saw everything. Then they decided they saw nothing.

It happens fast—a flick of the eyes toward the pavement and a shrug. I didn’t want to get involved. I never blamed people for being afraid. But I came to understand that looking away is a skill. You practice it. And the more you practice, the easier it gets, until one day you can stand in the middle of something plainly wrong and feel almost nothing at all.

I’ve been thinking about that skill lately, watching how much of the country has mastered it.

In light of this most recent performance by the POTUS, Prevaricator Of the United States, regarding the 2020 election, this issue is more critical than ever. The country sat and watched a president go on national television and build an entire demonstrably false issue out of whole cloth.

And a significant number will just accept that as gospel. Richard Nixon, the closest thing we have to a precedent for this behavior, couldn’t hold a candle to this level of lying.

We are living through a presidency that treats the office’s guardrails as inconveniences—norms as optional, institutions as obstacles, and the rule of law as something that applies to other people.

None of it is hidden.

It is announced, posted, broadcast, and repeated. And still the dominant reaction isn’t outrage. It’s a shrug. A scroll. A change of channel. He’s always like this. What else is new?

That reflex has a name, and cops know it well: the bystander effect. The more people who witness something wrong, the less likely any one of them is to act, because each assumes someone else will.

Responsibility spreads out until it evaporates.

A whole nation can watch the same thing at the same moment and somehow conclude, together, that it isn’t their problem.

Normalization is how it works. The first time a thing happens, it’s a scandal. The tenth time, it’s a pattern. The hundredth time, it’s just the weather. Each act that should have stopped us cold instead resets the baseline a little lower, and we adjust, the way you stop smelling a smell you’ve been sitting in too long.

The danger was never any single outrage. The danger is the adjusting.

I hear the defense, because I’ve heard it from people I love: I’m exhausted. I can’t take in one more terrible thing. Following all of it is a full-time job, and I already have one.

A tired, distracted public that has trained itself not to see is worth more to bad actors than any true believer ever could be.

Joe Broadmeadow

I understand the fatigue. I feel it too. But exhaustion isn’t absolution. “I was tired” has never once worked as a defense at a scene, and it won’t work here.

Turning your head is still a choice.

Pretending you don’t see is still a decision.

The whole point of Dylan’s question—asked more than sixty years ago and still waiting for an answer—is that turning away isn’t innocent. It’s what lets the rest of it continue.

Silence gets counted. Every strongman in history has understood something democracies keep forgetting. They don’t need most people to agree with them; they only need most people to look away.

Consent isn’t the goal. Silent acquiescence is.

A tired, distracted public that has trained itself not to see is worth more to bad actors than any true believer ever could be.

Supporters of the president will call this partisan hysteria—the alarms have been ringing for years, they’ll say, and the republic still stands. Maybe. But “it hasn’t collapsed yet” is not the reassurance they think it is. Buildings that fall stand right up until the moment they don’t.

I’m not asking anyone to burn with rage around the clock. That isn’t sustainable, and it isn’t the job. What I’m asking is simpler and harder: keep your eyes open. Refuse the easy relief of the shrug. Say the truth out loud, even when it costs you something at the dinner table.

Notice. Name it. Remember that you saw it.

Dylan never answered his own question. He left it turning in the wind, where it has been waiting ever since for each generation to answer for itself.

So, answer it.

How many more times will we turn our heads and tell ourselves we didn’t see?

We’re about to find out. I hope it is never again.