Plowing Water
“Seek out the truth,” they say, “and the truth shall set you free!”
How true is that? Can the truth be handled, no matter how painful? Does it always promote freedom or compel you to fight for it? Can you be enslaved by the truth too? Can the truth lie so deep that you may find yourself digging a moral or emotional grave rather than freeing yourself from the corruption of the earth?
Humans seem to be prone to look for closure; but they are also prone to torment themselves with some revelations. Freedom and slavery may not always be easy to define, embrace or reject.
Say, a loved one goes missing. There are no clues, no one knows anything, but you suspect a tyrannical government may have something to do with it. You fight the system, risking your own life until you find out the truth and the gruesome details. Torture, humiliations, and a brutal death were the last things your loved one knew of. You can now prove that the tyrant and his minions did it. Then, you start a fight to get the culprits prosecuted and sentenced, only to witness another government pardon the ones responsible for your loved one’s horrific death.
Many will say they still get a sense of closure out that extreme situation, but I still wonder if they truly experience peace or freedom from pain.
Some truths are harder to handle for sure, and some people cannot handle any hard truth at all. Some people are brave and humble enough to admit they’ve made mistakes; they may recant a statement, change a position and even an affiliation, but how much change can we take? How much time can we spend moving away from lies and embracing new truths that, after a while, may look as final as the previous ones?
Some truths can be so embarrassing that people would rather stay enslaved in lies than face their own responsibilities in the atrocities committed in the name of such lies. What a wonderful shield lies can be, especially if they are backed by men in uniforms. It becomes your word, your truth, against their weapons and the system designed with those weapons. The alleged Goebbelian maxim about a lie repeated a thousand times becoming truth may also suggest that the effort required to keep a lie is proportional to the effort required to stand and live with the hidden truth.
Far from setting you free, the truth enslaves you to a perpetual struggle for rectitude and justice. You become a vigilante without any superpower, except your desire for righteousness. However, your methods, the people you associate with, and the results of your struggles will often times result in complex situations that will inevitably contain half-lies or untold truths.
Thanks for your reading
This was my entry to @mariannewest, @felt.buzz, and @latino.romano’s 5-Minute Daily Freewrite: Wednesday Prompt: SEEK OUT THE TRUTH. You can see the details here
Make sure you visit the Freewrite House!!!
