"You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls.
And
those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt.
Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for
Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of
not knowing what I know: that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives.
And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives...You
don't want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don't talk about at parties,
you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.
We use words like honor, code, loyalty...we use these words as the backbone to a life spent defending something. You use 'em as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it! I'd rather you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to!"
I'm reading a very good book at the moment and everyone who knows me in real life is copping an earful of the stories from it: "Written on the Skin, an Australian forensic casebook", by Liz Porter. But it is full of truths that I can't really handle, and it's written in a way that tells me that the various forensic scientists (pathologists, crime scene investigators, entomologists, fire and bomb specialists) can't really handle it either. So they just handle their small part. A doctor writes a clinical and relatively emotionless report about the injuries on the murdered child, trying hard not to think about the person they used to be and the terrible circumstances of their life and death, and working really hard to go home to their own families without thinking about the surviving siblings, parents, grandparents. A bomb specialist spends three months matching can opener impressions to fragments of bomb pieces using a microscope, trying not to think about the mad and nasty supsect in custody and the threats he has made. Two scientists started obsessing over a hit-and-run and tracked down and photographed the bullbar of every red truck they saw for six months following their initial involvement in the case, but it paid off: the culpable driver was arrested and charged and imprisoned. Two days before he had booked the bullbar in for complete replacement.
See, it's haunting me too. And all I've done is read the book, 15 years after the man was convicted. The driver might actually be getting out of prison this year or next year.
The wonderful thing about language is that it lets us trigger each others' mirror neurons, and share the feelings associated with someone else's experience without ever going through that experience. And by not mentioning things, language also lets us pretend that certain experiences never existed, certain things never happened. It lets us live happily with a partial truth of experience.
As a child, I was frequently frustrated that I would have to learn things all for myself, and I wished I could just plug into grownups' brains and download (not my word at the time but a perfect word today) their knowledge, experience, kinetic abilities, TIMES TABLES, everything. Then I figured I could pick and choose what I needed.
When I was about 8 I changed my mind. I decided downloading others' experiences was not a good plan. I remember the moment. It went like this.
My godmother had a tattoo on her arm from Birkenau concentration camp (she was an extraordinary woman!), and every so often she would start telling a story and then stop mid-sentence. One particular day she started a story about when she was freed from the camp. After she had recovered a bit, she discovered that she'd caught the SS operative who had sent her and her family to the camp. She had been very angry for a very long time and without quite knowing why, she went to visit the man in prison. A Czech policeman handed her a loaded pistol, told her that accidents happen sometimes, and then he walked out of the room. So there she was with this man who had been so powerful three years earlier, now cowering half-dressed in a cell and looking at her holding the gun.... she took a step towards the man....
and stopped telling me the story mid-sentence!!!
I decided it was just fine that she'd stopped talking. Not a memory she wanted to share? I was good with that.
It was a decade later, when I was finishing high school, that she told me that she hadn't pulled the trigger, and that had haunted her all her life. The opportunity for vengeance, and she didn't have the stomach for a cold-blood revenge killing. Given the other things she did in the war, she took this as a point of personal failing.
Some may be asking how it could be appropriate for a woman to tell an 8 year old girl grizzly war stories like that. After reading "Written on the Skin", I realise there are three and four year olds who live and die in stories much more grizzly than this. And things that weren't acceptable to talk about back then - homosexuality, postnatal depression, sexual abuse in the various Churches - a lot of good has come to a lot of people as it has become acceptable to talk about these things, language was invented, and they have been finding their voice. And a number of very powerful people have come undone as the acceptability changed.
So there are experiential truths that we all get to the point of "I don't want to know." They are highly contextual: contextual to the experience of the speaker and the listener, contextual to the available language, contextual to the social standards of the time and place.
Right now, there are many truths that the collective "we" can't or won't handle.
Just about every one of our businesses and professions have truths that the broader population can't or won't handle. Food wastage in production, distribution and retail is mind-blowing for those not working in it. Suicides facing train drivers, or discovered by road and rail maintainers, are traumatic, heartbreaking, and completely excluded from the TAC and rail safety body stats. Where large sums of money are involved, the neglect of morality can make you feel ill, or anaesthatise with drugs or alcohol (as many executives and financial workers do). The pollution necessitated by mining, bulk goods processing is hideous - even the production of the Diptheria/Polio/Tetanus vaccine requires the disposal of 3 million fertilised chicken eggs per day.
But by removing these kinds of issues from the public consciousness, by collectively saying "You don't want to talk about it? That's fine with me", we also let them get away without scrutiny.
The effect of scrutiny will have to be another blog post later. (Actually I would love to do a PhD on something to do with the effect of scrutiny. But with three young kids and a 0.5 job which I'm trying to let simmer into a solid professional career, I'm not going to enrol in a PhD this year at least.)
The keepers of the public consciousness are many. The laws or code of conduct relating to the profession of journalism in the country, and the way individual journalists (as bringers-to-the-public-consciousness) handle their work, include or exclude certain topics has a big impact. Powerful individuals and organisations can be very good at covering distaseful things up (eg. the Catholic Church hiding and moving their pedophile priests). And as a distasteful truth comes into the open, many high-profile people have come undone. But maybe, maybe my 8 year old idea was a good one - maybe it's a good thing for a person not to know a bunch of this stuff - and not to even have any idea of the amount that she doesn't know.
So come on, somebody post something! What are the truths you come across that the collective "we" can't handle? How do you personally handle indigestible truths? Do you go and seek them, and then regret it a bit - like me reading the forensic casebook?
Do you care - do you think you ought to care - where your meat comes from, where your garbage goes, whether the company that you've invested your superannuation funds unethical drug experiments on Burmese poor people or ships appalling quantities of coal to China or Korea, what kinds of heavy metal poisoning happens to the people who disassemble your old CRT TV when you buy a new flat screen? Is it even your guilt to feel? Or should the experience die with the people who can't or won't talk about it? Does the truth matter? Should we learn to handle it? How should "we" decide what to keep secret?
(Sheesh, maybe I should talk about the small issues once in a while.)
This link is just a nice paper about embodied cognition which was going to go above but will have to find another home later.
We use words like honor, code, loyalty...we use these words as the backbone to a life spent defending something. You use 'em as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it! I'd rather you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to!"
I'm reading a very good book at the moment and everyone who knows me in real life is copping an earful of the stories from it: "Written on the Skin, an Australian forensic casebook", by Liz Porter. But it is full of truths that I can't really handle, and it's written in a way that tells me that the various forensic scientists (pathologists, crime scene investigators, entomologists, fire and bomb specialists) can't really handle it either. So they just handle their small part. A doctor writes a clinical and relatively emotionless report about the injuries on the murdered child, trying hard not to think about the person they used to be and the terrible circumstances of their life and death, and working really hard to go home to their own families without thinking about the surviving siblings, parents, grandparents. A bomb specialist spends three months matching can opener impressions to fragments of bomb pieces using a microscope, trying not to think about the mad and nasty supsect in custody and the threats he has made. Two scientists started obsessing over a hit-and-run and tracked down and photographed the bullbar of every red truck they saw for six months following their initial involvement in the case, but it paid off: the culpable driver was arrested and charged and imprisoned. Two days before he had booked the bullbar in for complete replacement.
See, it's haunting me too. And all I've done is read the book, 15 years after the man was convicted. The driver might actually be getting out of prison this year or next year.
The wonderful thing about language is that it lets us trigger each others' mirror neurons, and share the feelings associated with someone else's experience without ever going through that experience. And by not mentioning things, language also lets us pretend that certain experiences never existed, certain things never happened. It lets us live happily with a partial truth of experience.
As a child, I was frequently frustrated that I would have to learn things all for myself, and I wished I could just plug into grownups' brains and download (not my word at the time but a perfect word today) their knowledge, experience, kinetic abilities, TIMES TABLES, everything. Then I figured I could pick and choose what I needed.
When I was about 8 I changed my mind. I decided downloading others' experiences was not a good plan. I remember the moment. It went like this.
My godmother had a tattoo on her arm from Birkenau concentration camp (she was an extraordinary woman!), and every so often she would start telling a story and then stop mid-sentence. One particular day she started a story about when she was freed from the camp. After she had recovered a bit, she discovered that she'd caught the SS operative who had sent her and her family to the camp. She had been very angry for a very long time and without quite knowing why, she went to visit the man in prison. A Czech policeman handed her a loaded pistol, told her that accidents happen sometimes, and then he walked out of the room. So there she was with this man who had been so powerful three years earlier, now cowering half-dressed in a cell and looking at her holding the gun.... she took a step towards the man....
and stopped telling me the story mid-sentence!!!
I decided it was just fine that she'd stopped talking. Not a memory she wanted to share? I was good with that.
It was a decade later, when I was finishing high school, that she told me that she hadn't pulled the trigger, and that had haunted her all her life. The opportunity for vengeance, and she didn't have the stomach for a cold-blood revenge killing. Given the other things she did in the war, she took this as a point of personal failing.
Some may be asking how it could be appropriate for a woman to tell an 8 year old girl grizzly war stories like that. After reading "Written on the Skin", I realise there are three and four year olds who live and die in stories much more grizzly than this. And things that weren't acceptable to talk about back then - homosexuality, postnatal depression, sexual abuse in the various Churches - a lot of good has come to a lot of people as it has become acceptable to talk about these things, language was invented, and they have been finding their voice. And a number of very powerful people have come undone as the acceptability changed.
So there are experiential truths that we all get to the point of "I don't want to know." They are highly contextual: contextual to the experience of the speaker and the listener, contextual to the available language, contextual to the social standards of the time and place.
Right now, there are many truths that the collective "we" can't or won't handle.
- Multi-generational abuse and neglect. We sit on the sidelines, reading dole scandals in newspapers, and tut-tut. The turnover of social workers and case workers is huge - the good-hearted people who go in to help have a high incidence of breakdown and stress related illness.
- Human trafficking and slavery
- What goes on in prisons
- Meat animal farming, killing, and processing. A very few workers carry the brunt of what we don't want to know. Look it up on YouTube - or don't.
- Infectious disease models and mitigation. Not fun, I tell you.
- 3rd world poverty in general and what the 1st world is not doing about it
- One hundred and sixty missing women following gender-selective abortion, and what that means for women in general, both from Asia and worldwide.
- Pacific and Atlantic Gyre pollution. It's our plastic use that drives it. Look it up on Youtube - or don't.
- Garbage and landfill and the destruction it causes. Once again, a few workers, a few machines,nobody else has to think about what happens to the bin full of loaded nappies after the garbage truck drives away. This one I will give a link for: the Christchurch City Council funky recycling video. Plus the accent always makes me smile.
- Like Jack Nicholson so famously said, peaceful populations do still need military protection, we need men on walls with guns, although this is such a fraught contention that I am hoping someone reads this and POSTS A COMMENT, maybe even starts a brisk discussion!
Just about every one of our businesses and professions have truths that the broader population can't or won't handle. Food wastage in production, distribution and retail is mind-blowing for those not working in it. Suicides facing train drivers, or discovered by road and rail maintainers, are traumatic, heartbreaking, and completely excluded from the TAC and rail safety body stats. Where large sums of money are involved, the neglect of morality can make you feel ill, or anaesthatise with drugs or alcohol (as many executives and financial workers do). The pollution necessitated by mining, bulk goods processing is hideous - even the production of the Diptheria/Polio/Tetanus vaccine requires the disposal of 3 million fertilised chicken eggs per day.
But by removing these kinds of issues from the public consciousness, by collectively saying "You don't want to talk about it? That's fine with me", we also let them get away without scrutiny.
The effect of scrutiny will have to be another blog post later. (Actually I would love to do a PhD on something to do with the effect of scrutiny. But with three young kids and a 0.5 job which I'm trying to let simmer into a solid professional career, I'm not going to enrol in a PhD this year at least.)
The keepers of the public consciousness are many. The laws or code of conduct relating to the profession of journalism in the country, and the way individual journalists (as bringers-to-the-public-consciousness) handle their work, include or exclude certain topics has a big impact. Powerful individuals and organisations can be very good at covering distaseful things up (eg. the Catholic Church hiding and moving their pedophile priests). And as a distasteful truth comes into the open, many high-profile people have come undone. But maybe, maybe my 8 year old idea was a good one - maybe it's a good thing for a person not to know a bunch of this stuff - and not to even have any idea of the amount that she doesn't know.
So come on, somebody post something! What are the truths you come across that the collective "we" can't handle? How do you personally handle indigestible truths? Do you go and seek them, and then regret it a bit - like me reading the forensic casebook?
Do you care - do you think you ought to care - where your meat comes from, where your garbage goes, whether the company that you've invested your superannuation funds unethical drug experiments on Burmese poor people or ships appalling quantities of coal to China or Korea, what kinds of heavy metal poisoning happens to the people who disassemble your old CRT TV when you buy a new flat screen? Is it even your guilt to feel? Or should the experience die with the people who can't or won't talk about it? Does the truth matter? Should we learn to handle it? How should "we" decide what to keep secret?
(Sheesh, maybe I should talk about the small issues once in a while.)
This link is just a nice paper about embodied cognition which was going to go above but will have to find another home later.
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