Double Talk

Posted on April 7, 2003 in Crosstalk Thinking War

I’m not watching television these days. It’s deliberate. When the sounds of the word “liberation” and bomb explosions coalesce, I cannot sleep: How can you liberate the killed? I find myself asking.

And yet, if I point this out to others, they give me the wishy washy answer. I can’t think of any more direct statement about what a war does than a bomb throwing down walls and making hamburger out of human flesh. Yet many are the people who, when I point to the carnage, would say that my claim that war hurts innocent lives is only an opinion. They have one, I have one, and then there’s the truth, which is unknowable — according to them.

I don’t think so little of human beings that I can buy that no one sees the Truth. I call the “three sides” analogy flawed and a cop-out. It’s easy to seize on it as a matter of truth in these times because there are two clearly delineated sides and both of them are hawking propaganda. I don’t trust Saddam Hussein and I don’t trust George W. Bush. I don’t trust television because so much gets picked and chosen for the folks back home. Peter Arnet lost his job with NBC this last week because he interviewed Iraqi television executives about their side. He was accused of “taking the other side”. I call what he did “good journalism” because it is by hearing and analyzing both sides dispassionately that we can get a larger chunk of the Truth.

I can understand why most people are confused. First, we’ve been taught that news is supposed to be objective and truthful. The operant word is “supposed”. Most people don’t think on to point two which is that news organizations often feed us what they believe we want to hear or what those in power want us to hear. They fail to be objective and truthful. So we see propaganda coming out of the Iraqi television stations and propaganda coming out of the United States television stations. It begins to appear that there is no truth out there. But only if we rely on television for our news.

In any given dispute, I see several possibilities: First, one person can have a greater share of the Truth than another. Second, both may be benighted. Third, both may have the right angle on a particular part of the Truth, but be wrong about another.

I’ve noticed that throughout my life, one thing that nearly everyone craves is a sense that they are right. This is no different for those “three sides” metaphor because secretly, though they deny that any one person can hold the Truth, they are presenting themselves as having grasp of the real Truth out there. And the simplicity of the statement leads them to being dead wrong. The fact is one person can be right and another wrong. I feel this strongly about this war. Those who war or wreak other acts against human life are served by two types of people: true believers who buy all the propaganda and those who say that given the flood of information, they can’t decide if it is a bad thing or not.

Turn off your television. Think to the very root of moral truths and I think the whole picture will become quite clear: war destroys. That’s not a good thing.

Inspired by a post made by Sinister Sister and recent comments by jeanne d’arc.

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I got in trouble with a friend over this. She completely erased her blog from this site and dragged a follower after her. The funny thing was that only a few weeks ago, this pair was telling me that they’d support me “no matter what”. But because I “couldn’t keep my mouth shut” about the milkiness of their “stand” about the war, they packed up and left my life. I, for my part, have shut the doors after some harsh words that one of them directed at my wife and some sappiness from the other. “You don’t need people who turn on you like that,” one of them wrote in this very blog after someone else attacked me. But when it came down to it, it turns out that what was called a friendship was based on a lot of denial.

Doubtless they will say that it was because I couldn’t stand their having opinions different from mine that led to this. But hearken to this fact: they left my site. I made no effort until after an established fact to push them off or deny them access. I did not censor them nor would I attempt to do so: they did it all themselves. Their account is pure propaganda, an attempt to fob off the responsibility for their unreasonable behavior on me. When you look hard, you can see the Double Talk that hides a single, incontrovertible fact when you state what happens simply: they couldn’t take the fact that I disagreed with them publically for things they said publically. They did more than censor me: they erased me from their life.

I hate to say that no person matters. But for my own sanity, a door must be shut here and I must go on.

My views on the war have cost me friends and gained me many. How many of the new, I ask, will stay with me when relative peace arrives? It seems that experience is teaching me to have no certainties except what is here now.