Hanks has spent the speech warning about indifference as truth's ultimate nemesis — worse than propaganda, worse than ignorance, worse than intolerance, because those can be fought. Indifference, he says, will 'make moot all the permanence found in truth,' will 'rust away the promise of our promised land,' will make citizens into 'indentured servants held in labor by despots and tyrants whose default setting is cynicism.' It surges into the vacuum created by people made weary by struggle — so weary they lose hope and yearn to be saved by fictional superheroes. The three-way choice he presents is deliberately stark: there is no comfortable middle ground. You either do the work of the more perfect union, you oppose it, or you let it decay through indifference. The others get in the way.