Tuesday Voice: Truth

It does not alter

By Vic Midyett

It escapes me who it was, but a famous person once said something like this: “Truth does not alter according to our desire or willingness to accept it.”
    A funny example (that I know to be true) is when a three-year-old girl had what she considered a terrifying experience with a medical nurse. Back then all the nurses wore white stockings. A short while later this little girl saw her first live chickens. What did they have if not white legs! She was absolutely terrified of chickens and saw no point in their existence.
    Truth does not alter according to our desire or willingness to accept it.
    When we don’t have the correct information on a subject, we make it up ourselves. A good example is when a father and mother separate or divorce. Because the adults don’t think their children can grasp the reasons (I’m not saying they do), they give them generic information that leaves a lot of questions. The children then make up reasons to the best of their ability and imagination – reasons often involving guilt.
    Again, I know the following example to be true. A boy was one year old when his father left his mother. As he grew, the boy’s older brothers and mother didn’t talk bad about his father. The boy just knew that he used to have a father. As he grew older, he didn’t ask questions about his father. He didn’t even ask his father any questions when they started to get together every couple of weeks. It wasn’t until he was a late teenager that anyone learned what he had been thinking about what had happened all those years ago:
    He thought his father had left because he was born and his father didn’t want another son. He also told himself that his father had met the woman he was with now when he was married to his mother, and his father had left his mother because of her (when, in fact, his father did not meet the woman until two years after the divorce).
    The tragedy is that the son was more invested in making his father “wrong and bad” than he was in knowing the truth. To this day the son wants nothing to do with his father. Even after finding out from many independent sources that he had been completely wrong about his imaginings.
     Truth does not alter according to our desire or willingness to accept it.

Copyright © 2015 by Vic Midyett