When you read WDM, ask yourself a simple question: did you pay for it? No. You didn’t. And yet you carry yourself like some silent saint — reading in the shadows, lips sealed, hands idle, eyes pretending to be innocent. What is this hypocrisy? You don’t pay, you don’t comment, you don’t share — yet you soak up the fire like a sponge and walk away as if glancing through a few paragraphs was a favor you did WDM.
Do you think WDM survives in your silence? Do you imagine that truth spreads itself while readers sit on their hands? This is the tragedy: our readers behave like the Somali opposition — thunderous in private WhatsApp groups, invisible in public stance. They consume, they nod in agreement over tea, but when it comes to standing up and being counted, they fold like a cheap umbrella in the first gust of wind.
This isn’t gratitude. It’s graveyard silence. You read essays meant to enlighten, to warn, to arm you with truth in a season of lies — and you don’t light a single candle of reaction. Not even the flicker of a “like.” Not even the courage of a simple share. You read, you nod to yourself in secret, and then you lock the truth away in your head like contraband, as if knowledge were something to hoard rather than something to spread.
What is your measure of gratitude — to scroll past and vanish? Do you think knowledge grows stronger buried under your mattress, untouched, unspoken? While you hide behind your silence, the enemies of truth are counting their blessings. Every reader who consumes and disappears is a small victory handed to them for free. Cowardice dressed up as neutrality is still cowardice.
Reading without engaging is like going to a wedding, eating the food, and sneaking out the back without clapping for the bride and groom. It is worse than that, even — it is like attending a funeral, sitting through the prayers, and refusing to say “Innaa Lillahi wa innaa ilayhi raaji’uun.” What kind of guest behaves this way? What kind of audience?
WDM writes so that Somalis — at home and in the diaspora, in Garowe and in Toronto, in Mogadishu and in Minneapolis — might see their politics more clearly than the propaganda machines want them to. But the truth was never meant to travel a one-way street. If you believe silence is neutral, you are mistaken. Silence is not neutrality — it is complicity with ignorance. It is betrayal of the very enlightenment you just quietly consumed and quietly walked away with.
So here is the challenge, plain and unadorned: break the chains of mute readership. If you can’t pay, at least react. If you can’t contribute, at least share. If you can’t fight for the truth in public, at least stand up in the small way available to you and clap. WDM does not ask for your blood, your money, or your name in lights. It asks for your finger on the “share” button — the smallest act of courage there is, and still too much for too many.
Remember this, and remember it well: reading in silence doesn’t make you a thinker. It makes you a ghost — present in the room, invisible in the struggle, and utterly unaccounted for when history asks who stood where.
