THE ULTIMATE QUEST: TRUTH

In THE good old days, there used to be things you could believe in.
You could believe in a good oak tree. You could believe in a good stout rope.
You could toss that good stout rope over a limb of that good oak tree and have a swing you could believe would last virtually forever.
You could believe in a good blue sky; you could believe in a fast moving stream.
I believed in Pee Wee Reese. I believed in Roy Rogers. I believed in Uncle Felix and, of course, grand-ma. I also believed that if I went too fast on my brand new Schwinn, I would live to regret it. And often I did. I believed that the subways were always on time…
And that if I were good, good things would happen!


Now, I don’t believe in much of anything. Roy is gone; so is Trigger, his wonder horse. Pee Wee is gone. So is my fast-moving Schwinn bike. The subways no longer run on time. Grand-ma is gone and so is Uncle Felix. All the things I believed in are either gone or changed in ways that I don’t really understand except for maybe that stout oak tree.. The government doesn’t tell us the truth any longer. And as a result, I’ve started to listen to other governments. Even the NYTimes since Scotty and Walt Lippmann left can no longer be counted on. And I’ve started reading the truths in other magazines and newspapers.

In my pure dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs, I had proposed that as a last resort, we hold a conference on truth-telling and invite all of the famous truth-tellers in the world. We would have Kurt Vonnegut and Gore Vidal and maybe even Mel Brooks or one of the Pythons to represent humorous truth. And then we would ask them the eternal verities. We might not like the answers though…Or it might make us all feel a little better for a little while. But I don’t think it could be arranged and I suspect nobody would tell us the truth about why.

I sometimes wonder whether truth is only the province of little boys and girls. And as you get on in years, you discover that this isn’t true and that isn’t true, until there’s not much left.
But you can’t tell your friends, because they think you’re crazy. And you can’t tell your children because you would deprive your children from learning it themselves; although, I don’t know what good that does either? Maybe it’s our punishment for thinking that the truth is important somewhere along the line. . I don’t know. Nobody seems to care about clearing the issue up anyway so it’s a rather moot point.. So we just try to keep our own standards and move forward like a shark. Why? Who knows? But now I can imagine how Diogenes must have felt…

Les Aaron