One of the surprising
things about being "old, alone, and at the edge of death" is a new
redeeming perspective on telling truth to power.
The powerful do not
like having truth spoken to them, as anyone who has ever tried it
knows only too well. Solzhenitsyn cites an old Russian proverb at the
end of his Nobel Speech which goes: one word of truth can change the
world. Tolstoy says similar things in many places, in one of which he
says that the rulers of the world know this very well, so they
zealously guard against its emergence.
They say things to you
like “You'll never work in this town again,” in its many variants
but probably they just do their destruction on you long before you
know a thing about it. A favorite twist on it is to threaten your family.
Some contemporary truth
speakers who come to mind are Snowden, Greenwald, Assange, Manning
and Ellsberg.
I just loved McGovern
confronting Donald Rumsfeld at a lecture that Rumsfeld had just given
in Atlanta. McGovern took up Rumsfeld on his lie that he knew where
Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were – north, east, south and
west of Tikrit and Baghdad. The audience started getting physical
toward McGovern for being such a rogue, so impolite, as to confront
Rumsfeld on an obvious lie. You know just from the way Rumsfeld cited
each of the four directions, that he was pulling it out of his butt.
They started going for him physically and he said “Hey, this is
America!” It was a brilliant thing to say to such people, and it
worked.
That little bit of
truth speaking may have saved far more lives and had a bigger effect
on the world that was first apparent. The reaction of the crowd was
just everything I despise. A courageous, truthful man speaks the
truth and thereby does untold good, and “Real Americans,”
patriots, wannabes and hangers-on-to-the-system and apparatchiks and
the arrogant try to stop, even to murder him with their mindlessness.
If you try some truth-speaking you will likely get death threats, and
when you go to the police for protection on these occasions you find
out very quickly who side they are on. The police told me on one such
occasion, “Well, if I were you, I would get out of town for at
least three days.”
There were many times
over the course of my life when I spoke truth and received that
response. A big one was my refusal to participate in the Viet-Nam
war. Another instance, perhaps even more dramatic in its clarity for
me, was when I addressed the faculty of the community college where I
had taught for about ten years. The community colleges where
visionary, progressive, hopeful places when they first started, but
as usually happens with such vision and hope, they became sclerotic,
mind-numbing inferior copies of the same old repression that they
were designed to overcome or at least ameliorate. A great vision soon
becomes co-opted into its exact opposite: what was once a great
movement accrues people who are really after money and respectability
or ancient ego or hidden malice and they destroy it.
So I spoke to the
faculty of this college about it, citing the implications of
Plutarch's description of the mind as a fire to be kindled rather
than a receptacle to be filled. I was, of course, vilified and voted
down for telling the truth. I resigned the job, relatively
well-paying and having tenure, at the end of that semester. There
were only one or two faculty out of a hundred that supported me, and
a third person said,”you are right, but I have a family to
support.” She herself had tenure but she was still full of such
fear and already so corrupted as not to come out openly in support of
me. The anger at me over the meeting was so intense, and faces so
red, that I felt things could have gotten physical, although they did
not.
So now, in my old age
at the end of my life, and having paid the price for truth-speaking,
I have come to the realization of redemption. It's easier than ever
for me and other old people to speak the truth – you're going to
die any day now anyway, so it doesn't really matter even if they come
shoot you in the heart, destroy your ability ever to get job again,
or lock you in solitary for the rest of your life. That is actually
true for anyone, taking anything like a large perspective. Life
passes so very quickly.
I can now see with
thanks and delight how good it was for me to have stuck with it despite the
price, and I see, without any gloating or vindictiveness, what
happens to those who do not stick by it. They become so debased and
corrupted that they are incapable of redeeming themselves. It's much
too long a task - I would say impossible - if they have a massive
load of lies they have lived on and under.
There have been
late-in-life “conversions,” at the death bed, and all that. But
William James would say that such conversions are not immediate acts,
but have been in preparation for a long time previously, on the
subconscious level particularly.
Every word I have
written here is the truth, and I know that there are people out there
in the USA who would gladly kill me for writing it, but it doesn't
bother me now, yes because I've had ”a glimpse of the promised
land,” but also death will definitely happen any day now.
