Five Ways to Silence a Lamb

Terrence Willis

1. Initiate a campaign to make the lamb, by its nature already fodder for more dangerous animals, a villain; a campaign complete with images and dogwhistles that incite the vitriol of those in need of a villain to scapegoat.

2. Characterize the lamb as stubborn, recalcitrant, at the root of the social problems plaguing contemporary society due to the element of its refusal to assimilate encourages.

3. Make the means of the lamb’s demonstration palatable to spectators; a kindness being done for the lamb’s own good that could be much worse if left to someone less “tolerant.”

4. Encourage the lamb to question itself. Why being a lamb is so important compromising even an inch of its existence as a lamb makes it a traitor to all lambkind.

5. Administer an anesthetic to render it incapacitated so that it can’t fight back.

Terrence Willis is a current student at EIU. This transformative essay is based on a work by Gloria Anzaldua called “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” This piece focuses on anger caused by the systematic stifling of a generation of voices that are proud to sound different.