Before I get to the pictures of Ron and Shalom, a brief digression on the current state of mind of people who can't seem to process anything that disagrees with their preconceptions.
We live in fraught times where the word truth has taken on meanings that have little and nothing to do with anything verifiable as, well, truth.
I will acknowledge this as I start: there are categories of human experience where truth is not a hard thing. The area of religious truth is perhaps the most obvious. To a believer in a god, any god, that is a truth they will not deny and there's no point arguing with someone about this. One might wonder why there are so many true gods whose believers deny that any god but their own is true, but that's the problem with faith: it doesn't require any demonstrable proof, cannot be disproven and must be taken on, hah, faith. If you don't have it of course you won't get it.
There is another category of truth that bends reasonableness and that is truth based on anecdote and hearsay. Think about it, someone says something happened to someone they know and the speaker knows the person who told them the story is reliable so it must be true. Well, I guess so if you define true to include this sort of reporting. I know people who believed JFK was murdered by supporters of assassinated South Vietnam's President Ngô Đình Diệm in revenge for the CIA's murder. There's no evidence for this but a novel published in 1975, "The Tears of Autumn" used this as a major plot device and the idea was looked on as an "it must be true" if this novel says so. Flimsier evidence I cannot imagine but I know this theory is still current among some true believers.
Does the word truth need to be retired from discussions of factually demonstrable subjects, areas of knowledge open to experimentation and our direct experience of the world? What can we replace it with? I know it's possible for two people to hold opinions that are in direct opposition and both people are convinced theirs is the truth. Well, one of them must be wrong, right? It seems that the evidence is very strong, backed by facts that Trump lost the election of 2020 yet Trump and his supporters strongly deny this, claiming all sorts of unverifiable theories and already disproven conspiracies to the contrary. These folk are either ignorant or lying. If we call them liars we believe they know the facts and just won't admit them. If they are ignorant, at this point their ignorance is willful because the facts have been broadcast for the past several years, and being willfully ignorant and continuing to voice these lies makes them liars. Yet they will assert they are in possession of the truth.
I guess you can have your truth, I can have mine but at least admit that we will need to have one set of facts.
And yes, light is both a particle and a wave even if you can't believe it.
The last Saturday of 2023 I met up with my friends Ron Kolm and Shalom Neuman in Easton, PA. Shalom is an artist, founder of the Fusionism movement and of the International Fusionism Museum. Ron is a writer of fiction and poetry, most recently his The Bookstore Book: a Memoir published by Pink Trees Press, as well as an editor on many small press anthologies, including the current Brevitas anthology and all of the Unbearables anthologies.
It was an overcast and chilly day, neither surprising for a winter in eastern Pennsylvania. We walked around for a bit. I was hoping to walk with them to the abandoned and desolate Easton train station on the south side of the Lehigh River. For several reasons we didn't get quite there, stopping on the Third Street Bridge about halfway across the river, just past and under the Jersey Central trestle over the bridge and river. We will make it to the train station another time.
Later we walked past Easton's restored central plaza at the intersections of Northampton and 3rd St. and then to dinner.
Remember what Moynihan said about opinions and facts.
ReplyDeleteI do remember what he said but does that mean everyone has a right to share their opinion if there are no facts with it?
ReplyDelete