The below is an edited version of Oliver Anthony’s speech to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) on Wednesday, 19 February.
Since August of 2023, I have received a flood of messages social media, email, handwritten letters. I’ve had I don’t know how many conversations with people face to face. Probably thousands at this point. And I realise now that we don’t have any clue as to how many around us are really broken. How many are silently suffering and barely hanging on. More often than not, they start the message with ‘hey, I’m a nobody, but’, followed by horrors of addiction, mental illness, financial and household struggles, oftentimes incredibly complicated stories that I suspect they may have never told anyone before. But they still have hopes of a hopeful future, and they don’t want to give up no matter what.
And it kills me because these people, they aren’t nobodies, as they describe themselves.
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