*IMO | Refuse the Whisper!
- John-Michael Scurio
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Someone at work recently told me a story that instantly gave me chills.
His daughter's teacher taught a game in history class, a tidy little experiment in human fear.
The name of the game: The Witch in the Classroom. The foundation of the game: Salem, MA.
Now, me being from Medford, MA (very close to Salem,) I felt so impacted by this story that it inspired me to write another *IMO blog-post. ("in my opinion")
Thanks for reading.
Here's the story...
The teacher addressed the class saying, I will now walk around the room and whisper privately to each of you. I will label you "a witch" or "a regular person." He said the whole room instantly lit up with suspicion.
He then proceeded to walk around and whisper softly into the ear of each student. After every student received their label, he then gave the following instructions:
Now, do all that you can to form the biggest group without a witch. If your group has even one witch, you all fail. Suspicions grew stronger.
Everyone immediately started interrogating each other. Are you a witch? How do we know you’re not lying?
Some kids clung to one big group, but most broke off into smaller, exclusive cliques. They turned away anyone who seemed uncertain, nervous, or gave off even the slightest hint of being guilty.
The energy shifted fast. Suddenly everyone was suspicious of everyone.
Whispers. Finger-pointing. Side-eyes.
Trust dissolved in mere minutes
Finally, when all the groups were formed, the teacher said to the class:
“Alright, time to find out who fails. Witches, raise your hands.”
Not one single hand went up. The whole class exploded. “Wait! You messed up the game!”
And then the teacher dropped the bomb:
“Did I? Were there any actual witches in Salem, or did everyone just believe what they were told?”
My co-worker's daughter said that her entire classroom went silent.
That’s when it hit all of them. No witch was ever needed for the damage to happen. Fear had already done its work. Suspicion alone divided the entire class, turning community into exactly what we’re seeing today?
Different words, same playbook
Instead of “witch,” it’s "liberal," "conservative," "vaxxed," "unvaxxed," "pro-this," "anti-that," "Democrat," "Republican."
By the time the teacher asked the witches to stand, no one did; because the real power had never lived in the accused. It lived in the whisper. It lived in the slow, contagious confidence that if you say something long enough and loudly enough, it will become true.
A talented history teacher teaching an important lesson in how society has functioned for decades.
We now live in a new act of the same story
The “witch in the classroom" game has taken on modern names: "undocumented," "suspect," "outsider," "other." This spring and summer, federal immigration sweeps (fast, targeted, and often televised) have become a method of governance. Downtown courthouses and workplaces have been the sites of arrests and ambushes; protests that grew from outrage have met tear gas and pepper balls; cities once wary of overreach now find neighbors skipping calling police because fear has hollowed trust. Those are not isolated headlines. They’re a pattern: rumor made policy, policy made panic, panic remade neighborhoods.
Remember Salem’s mechanism
It didn’t start with incontrovertible evidence. It started with stories (spectral evidence, jealousies, old grudges, family feuds) amplified by priests, judges, and an anxious public.
The result was predictable: people who had been woven into a community were stripped away by accusation alone. In 2025, modern raids, whether at large work sites or outside courthouses, do something similar.
They send a pulse through a town: who’s safe to knock on the door? Who will call 911 now? Which children will be taught to whisper suspicion as armor? In 2025, the machinery has changed . . . vans, press briefings, the social feeds (oh, the social feeds) . . . but the playbook reads the same.
Yet, as time rolls on, our Eureka Springs stands in this story as a reminder that place can resist that script. Founded as a health resort in the late 19th century around mineral springs, its history is one of people coming ... sometimes running ... to find healing and a new narrative. Today, in 2025, our downtown, is preserved and eclectic, it is the opposite of a hunting ground; it’s a marketplace of strangers who become neighbors. That’s not romanticism. It’s social insurance.
"The more places where people are known for their lives instead of their labels, the weaker the whisper becomes." - John-Michael Scurio
So, what does it mean that our politics now sometimes resemble a witch-hunt? It means the logic of fear rewards the loudest rumor, not the quiet evidence. It means policies that promise quick certainty (sweep, detain, deport) trade long-term civic trust for short-term headlines. It means communities fracture in ways that will take decades to mend: businesses lose workers, courts lose faith from people who should be able to seek justice, kids learn that belonging is conditional on not being suspected. We have watched that dynamic play itself out in microcosm before; history is blunt about its costs.
And yet . . .
Here is the stubborn thing about towns like Eureka Springs and memorials in Salem: memory and choice coexist. Salem’s memorials were built to name the damage and to force us to look at it, stone by stone. Eureka Springs preserves streets and stories that resist single-story narratives about who belongs. If the tide of contemporary politics is to be contested, it will be at that granular level . . . in cafes, PTA meetings, downtown shop counters, and the conversations parents have after school. Refusal is a civic art: refuse the whisper, refuse to be weaponized by suspicion, refuse to let policy be the only language of belonging.
If you want to feel this tension on your skin, walk the stone benches of Salem’s memorial and read the names carved into the quiet. Then drive south and walk the steep, tight, winding streets of Eureka Springs, where the town has chosen to be a refuge and a stage for reinvention. The lessons are not opposites but complements: remember the cost of rumor; practice the harder work of repair.
The Reality of Today
The "witch in the classroom" game ends with this important clarification: there were no witches that day.
The damage had already been done. Today, the mechanics are more modern, the rhetoric more wired, and yet the stakes just as real. We choose how the story continues: do we keep playing the game where the whistleblower wins and the neighbor loses? Or do we build towns and laws that require evidence, that privilege humanity over headlines, that treat fear as a signal to listen rather than an excuse to hunt?
That’s the decision between Salem and Eureka Springs in miniature and in the same breath, it’s the decision every city, town and every family will need to make in order to see this black veil rise from the face of America. Refuse the whisper. Name the cost. Tend the people. That’s how a country stops becoming a map of hunting grounds and starts becoming a map of places people stay and thrive.
Refuse the whisper!
Well, that's my opinion.❤️
*IMO is a blog-series where I, John-Michael Scurio, express my own personal opinion about some subject or situation. It's an editorial of sorts. "But what about the opinions of others?" people ask. "Yeah, that!" I reply, "Well, this specific blog-series isn't about other opinions - just mine. If I opened it all up to other opinions, I'd need to change the acronym (IMO) to something else and it probably wouldn't feel as cool, but, hey, that's also just my opinion."
Do you want me to write and *IMO blog-post about something new? Tell me about it: jmscurio@yahoo.com Please take a moment to check out the different posts in this particular blog series on www.iloveureka.com.
Spread love, my friends.
