The only thing that matters is the truth
Yes, even if it hurts… especially if it hurts!
What have we become?
A question I find myself wondering about more and more. Increasingly as time passes by as I am confronting myself with the madness our western society has so willingly let itself be taken over by.
But what is this truth, anyways? I would say truth is what’s undeniable! Truth is objective reality. If I have one apple twice, one in the left and one in the right hand — I have two apples. If I jump off a building I will die! If I punch someone in the face for no reason, I am wrong!
The last example is where the figurative “slope” gets so slippery in our times. If I punch someone I hurt him. Is it wrong because I did him harm? Or is the physical violence without any given context the determination of my doing? In our “modern” days where more and more the case is being made, that words are violence one can’t be so sure about it anymore, I guess.
But shouldn’t there be a difference between hurting someone physically and hurting someone with “words”? It is said that there is no sword mightier than the word. But that doesn’t help my case at all *sighs*.
That’s what I’m thinking about, most of the time. A victim doesn’t punch back. He endures the beating, suffers through it, suffers probably a while after it as well. Maybe even forever through anxiety.
I’m a pacifist, I didn’t punch back as well. At first I didn’t because I was scared, then I became a pacifist and didn’t do it by decision and it changed me. I found some sort of truth, some might call it “my truth” — I certainly call it that. I found out that violence isn’t the answer, I literally found that out the hard way. Oh, how many times was I beaten up. Every weekend (at least it feels like that retrospectively) someone thought it was a good idea to punch me. I didn’t react! Sometimes, when I was in a very good mood I just stood there smiling and the weirdest thing happened: They stopped and left! Sometimes they even came back with a beer (which I counted as an apology).
Where’s the truth in that? Isn’t that weird? Wouldn’t it make more sense that someone who doesn’t fight back gets beaten up indefinitely? But I wasn’t anymore. And after a period of time, I think it was after three years, all of a sudden it stopped. And it stopped ever since.
Not that I didn’t face some situations where violence was imminent, but it never happened. I’ve even become such a “force” that I was once told by a friend of mine who basically beat up people every weekend, that it was my presence that calmed him down and made him choose not to engage in more violence this day when we were on that party. How does that make any sense?
The truth can be a bitch!
Often I didn’t want to here the truth. I hated it when my dad honestly said what he thought about me. I hated it when my teachers openly declared their dislike of me. I feared it whenever I moved to a new town, went to a new school, that I wouldn’t be accepted and disliked, ostracised by my new classmates. All of those reactions were kind of the truth, weren’t they? And man, they didn’t just hurt when I got inevitably beaten up. They hurt to the core before they became physical.
And yet, without truth there is no growth. How could there be? If all everyone would have ever said to me was that I am perfect the way I am, that everything I thought I know was right… where could there have been any place for growth? How could I ever change, how could I ever learn that I am wrong, that my opinions are wrong, that maybe what I know is wrong. Shouldn’t someone who thinks 1+1=3 be told that he’s wrong even if it threatens to shatter his world into pieces? Where is the border of the truths we have to tell someone, especially when this border seems to become tighter and tighter, the border around the things that are true that have to be told, that still are allowed to be told. Outside of which all the things lie that are true but we cannot say.
If we jump from a building we die. Mother Nature doesn’t differentiate in that. No differences in appearance or opinions matter. We jump, we die, in that we are all the same. That’s a truth that will always hurt, even if we should try to deny it! What else is as well?
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