Wednesday, January 14, 2009 Sula: Truth and mice By Jun Sula Commentary
ALL weeklong, truth suffered a terrible spin, if not a beating, on many fronts.
In the home front, a minor siege at the provincial capitol erupted into a word war between the priest-governor and his not-so-favorite provincial police director. Both ended up claiming truth was on their side or they being on truth's side.
The cynics must have a grand time revisiting an old maxim that in war, truth becomes the first casualty.
The public, especially the partisans, did not have to be as philosophical. They have the unique advantage of established norm. A priest will not lie. Or even if he will, he is not as likely to as any lesser mortal like, for example, a police officer. That can be challenged but the fact that it is shows where the bias is, which is not necessarily the truth.
There is too the matter of being there when it happened. When the protesters breached the imaginary security line and allegedly started banging and kicking the governor's office door and, the governor was there. The police officer wasn't. In court, someone's second-hard version easily gets labeled as hearsay versus a witness' first-hand account.
In context, both versions of truth are suspect. Having a lingering dislike for one or the other is enough motive to taint one's claim to truth. That's malice, I think. The governor, so it has been said, has long wanted to ease the police officer out of office. His version of truth, so it has been put forth, only magnified the malevolent intent, as it were.
Truth, according to Oscar Wilde, is seldom pure and simple. Following this route, the police officer's version of what really was the truth was, indeed, convoluted and complicated to the ordinary believer in truth.
If truth suffers, so do people whose lives revolve around it. If it is supposed to set men (and women) free, nothing could be further from the truth in this case. Most people remain captive and unsettled on what really happened - apart from who's at fault-on the New Year' siege that should become part of the governor's historic stint.
While the governor was too busy defending his truth against attack from another official's version of it, truth or some unscrupulous people's version of it sent a rural bank's depositors in frenzy withdrawal.
Were it not for a timely intervention of some responsible business leaders, who apparently were more concerned with practical realities than political truth, the rural bank sector might have been seriously jeopardized.
That's what happens when, as they say, a lie can travel halfway around the world while truth is still tying its shoes.
And those who are supposed to be vigilant against lies of all kinds - political, economic and what-have-you lies - are distracted by less important, if not inconsequential, truth. Some people see more truth in a grain of sand than in a truck chock-full of it, let alone in a bank besieged by panicky depositors.
In that sense, truth can be diversionary, if not misleading, too.
It seems to me other people are no longer having problems with truth. Either truth is not an issue, or that issues have always been truthfully addressed.
Once, on a trip abroad recently, I came across an amusing, if mind-stirring, news item. In a famous city, city officials had called an emergency meeting to look into reports that a small number of mice had been caught in a public building.
The immediate consensus was: it was not supposed to happen - the mice roaming around the public building, not the pests being caught.
The moral: truth should not distract anyone from saying or doing the right thing.
Nor should supposed-to-be sensible people supposed to be quarreling publicly about whose version of truth should have preeminence in public mind.
After all, shouldn't truth be as obvious and uncomplicated as some mice wandering about their business in full view of people who know what mice are? And what about priorities, more important than truth, or some big-ego's version of it?
