OPINION: In the circumstances, the only safe thing to say is to say nothing at all. Queen Elizabeth managed it for 70 years, while still talking amiably to thousands of people. It’s a skill the rest of us may need to master.
Amid all the nonsense, hagiography and persiflage is that is going to be written about the late Elizabeth Mary Alexandra Saxe-Coburg-Gotha—aka Queen Elizabeth II—over the coming days and weeks, let me get my oar in early and single out one really remarkable skill she had that never gets enough attention.More importantly, it’s one of the few life and career skills she displayed during her amazing 70-year reign that is actually useful for the rest of us.
I write this as someone who is so far from having this skill that I can’t even imagine it. My teachers called me “motormouth” when I was in primary school—and that was in New York in the 1970s, when pretty much everyone in class talked like John McEnroe.If you think a privileged monarch like Queen Elizabeth had everything easy, just indulge for a second in a quick thought experiment.
Her reign began with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. It ended with Liz Truss—someone who says it is a “disgrace” that the British eat so much French cheese, and who thinks barking patrol dogs can scare away enemy drones. And yet there she was on Tuesday, dying, but still smiling sweetly and graciously as she invited Ms. Truss to form a government.People may guess about her political opinions—because of who she was they assumed she was conservative—but she never voiced them.
The reason this is so relevant today to the rest of us is because of this appalling wave of hyper politicization that has swept over our society. Wherever you are, there’s a good chance you operate now in an office, and maybe a social environment, where it can be highly risky to voice any opinion, least of all a dissenting one. heaven forbid you should be guilt of Wrongthink. Such is the way of unemployment, “cancellation” and the social gulag.
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