 |
 |
 |
|
 |
What is your experience of trust?
And this is my question to you, as reader, as human, as citizen. How can we talk about this time of transition from youth to adult? For the present essay, it has two separate aspects. We can each pose the question: Was my own sense of trust in the adult world suddenly crushed by a single event in my life? Or do I still trust it? The other aspect concerns the portrayal of current events, recent history, and political discourse: which of these portrayals are true and which are untrue? How can one possibly tell the difference? Would any of you be willing to think about this, and then write about it? Or even talk to your friends about it? Since most of you are younger than I am, your connection with this period of transition will differ from my own. If we can expand these questions beyond this single essay, we could together learn more about the various stages we passed through. In my own life, I have had a long-term interest in how people organize themselves, from the community to the national level. But my interest in the possibility that political figures could consistently and deliberately lie began when I began reading about the Warren Report on the assassination of President Kennedy. My attention was caught by several statements that seemed to contradictory. From there, I was motivated to look more closely at the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. The only believable conclusions I could form were that the investigators were either extremely incompetent or that they were lying. In either case, the near unanimous silence from the press concerning the holes in their arguments was even more troubling. The range of political consciousness among the readers of this essay will go from A to Z. I can make no assumptions about what anyone knows or believes about the political condition of this country. I would like to give some examples and pose some questions, having witnessed “current events” for some years now. This country has many myths. Among them are the following: The legal system protects us. Judges and the police are honest. Only bad people go to jail. Our foreign policy is benevolent. We have a free press. Hard work pays off. Elections are the key to our democracy. Congress genuinely represents the will of the people. We only go to war when threatened by a foreign power. I suspect each reader could add to this list. (I invite such additions.) A book by Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe, contains many examples of the ways in which myths and ignorance combine to produce horrible outcomes for some groups of people. His premise is that we are more likely to repeat the mistakes of the past to the extent that we ignore our own history. While some could label it a rant, I feel that it will be considered an important book a hundred years from now. From a complete list of myths that we could form, it is likely that some would be easier to demonstrate historically than others. Some could even be entirely false. Yet all of them, including the group that is entirely false, shape both our lives and our public discourse about the choices we have for appropriate action. Action is the reason for being on earth. If we look around the world today we can find many groups that feel oppressed by some other group, and are looking for a way to change things. In the Sixties, the Black Panthers decided that carrying rifles around the streets of Oakland was the best way to stop the police from killing more of their friends. Members of ACT-UP, the Aids activist group, got tired of waiting for government attention and decided that being openly disruptive was the best method of advancing their agenda. Around the world, there are many groups in open and deadly warfare with their governments. They all want change. Is there a common thread to this conflict? I have wondered about this for a long time. When a child in school is taught American history, the choices behind the deliberate death and destruction of large numbers of people are presented, if at all, in a minimal manner. We know that many people died during the Civil War. Do we know who benefited from it? From World War I? From World War II? When one is between the age of 15 and 25, and investigates beyond the depth of TV news, I believe that the shock of learning how the world generally works, and then remembering how it was presented in high school, leads to a deep, almost unconscious doubt about authority figures in general. This in turn can lead to passivity and inaction. Some adults claim that telling students the truth before they are ready will destroy their hope and trust in the world, turning them into cynics who are prone to escape into drugs and apathy. I wish to draw attention to the equal likelihood of cynicism resulting from the discovery that our political leaders all lie most of the time. But whether one becomes invigorated or destroyed by our culture largely depends on hidden factors in ones biography and karma. I feel that the process of transition from relative innocence to relative experience is at the root of the possible loss of self-government that is looming on our political horizon. The natural world operates beyond our normal use of “moral” and “immoral.” The cultural world created by humans is a mixture of good and evil. To see the cultural world as it is does not compel us to righteous anger and political action, nor does it compel us to avoid all contact with the news and the public lies that surround us. We are truly free in our response. How does someone feel when she or he learns that another has been lying about something significant, “...in order to protect you -- I didn’t want you to be hurt”? When faced with this situation, most everyone I know has said the same thing: “Why didn’t you trust me? How did you think I would feel when I found out?” Or “Did you really think you could hide this forever?” There is almost always an initial sense of both outrage and hurt or sadness. When statements by political figures are later shown to be false, they often claim that someone else is responsible . Colin Powell has recently stated that he thought his speech at the UN, justifying the Iraq War, was true at the time, and the fault of its inaccuracies lay elsewhere in the governmental bureaucracy. Could he have personally verified his statements before that key speech? Each of us is responsible for how we act in the world. Since we do not have unlimited time or resources, we tend to trust others to inform us about various parts of the world. In the past, newspapers and magazines were the primary source. Then television news became more accepted. Today, the internet provides thousands of daily options for gathering information. Despite this abundance, it seems that a majority of the citizens of every country still tend to trust the public statements of their leaders. Before our last presidential election, polls claimed that 60% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks. They apparently believed this because our government and our media had repeated it thousands of times in the previous few years. Was he connected to the attacks? “In this they proceeded on the sound principle that the
magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility,
since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their
hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely
evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of
their minds, they more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a
little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would
be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never
enter their heads, and they will not be able to believe in the possibility
of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others;
yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt
and waver and continue to accept at least one of these causes as
true. Therefore, something of even the most insolent lie will always
remain and stick -- a fact which all the great lie-virtuosi and
lying-clubs in the world know only too well and also make the most
treacherous use of.” “Top policy makers are intelligent, resourceful, and
generally more aware of what they are doing than those who see them
as foolish and bungling. U.S. policy is not filled with contradictions
and inconsistencies. It has performed brilliantly and steadily in
the service of those who own most of the world and who want to own
all of it. That some critics may not know what policy makers are
doing does not mean the policy makers themselves do not know what
they are doing. That Western leaders make misleading statements
about their goals and intentions does not denote confusion on their
part but a desire to confuse their publics as to what interests
they are really serving. That they are misleading others does not
mean that they themselves are mislead, although of course there
are times when they make mistakes and suffer bafflement in regard
to tactics and timing.” Essays: Youth Section • Trust • Adventure Therapy |
 |
