TruthS

November 14, 2009

It's morning again, and I'm ruminating--again--on my perennial question, how would the world be different if everyone had a place to say what s/he sees from where she/ stands in the world?

Really---wouldn't that---coupled of necessity with listening to what multiple others see from where they're standing---go a long way toward dismantling the illusion that THE TRUTH is available to any one person or nation or religion? And imagine what THAT would dismantle, only imperialism, exploitation, holy war, domestic violence, terrorism---all that messy, expensive stuff we say we just don't know how to stop.

There's a belief out there that the Age of Narcissism is upon us because we've fostered everyone to want to "tell their story". Not a bit of it. There is precious little fostering, rather a whole boatload of fomenting, with "creators" of reality, tell-all, talk, and cable news shows manipulating stories into dramas, soap-opera-ish plots in which the underlying question is always: who's the winner? ( The answer to that being who's taking the most money to the bank.)

(I'm sitting here in the aftermath of seeing a clip of Sarah Palin on last night's news, ok cable news, telling Oprah Winfrey we don't like drama in reference to the fomented to the tune of millions of dollars war of words between "we" and the father of Palin's first grandchild, Levi Johnston.)

RIGHT.

I wish "we" could learn to like the tender, nuanced, necessarily situational and partial truths of one another, offered in trust and in the spirit of adding our pieces to what is not so much a puzzle, as a mosaic-being-made moment by moment.

Right now it's looking like a mosaic made by madmen (and women) and the rest of us not knowing how our small, messy, pieces could possibly find a place among the bold, pretending-to-be-certain pieces our culture has grown addicted to.