From time to time I re-read “If”, by Rudyard Kipling, just to remember how to be a “MAN”. It’s not an easy path to follow for anyone. It’s not a smooth highway; it is merely a steep mountain path. If you chose it, you are actually walking it barefoot. You get hurt a lot by the sharp rocks which try to stop you. It is up to you if you will stay on it up to the end, or let the pain turn you into another sharp rock that will try to stop others from following this path. Some people would say that you are crazy trying to walk it. I would call you an abnormal. While the rocks which try to stop you, I would call them the normal people I keep talking about in this blog.
So, this time, these two verses drew my attention more than any other time:
“If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,…”
We all know that in general, a truth is not absolute. It varies depending on how each participant was involved in it, what interest they have, what state of mind they had at the moment when a situation was built. This is why when you ask ten people about the same event, they will tell you different … or slightly different stories. As an investigator, you wouldn’t actually be able to see the absolute truth about that event.
Let’s imagine an event happening between two people: a normal person and an abnormal one. The abnormal person, with his/her strong moral values set, will tell his/her version as close to what actually happened as possible, even if sometimes the details would hurt him/her. An abnormal person does that: taking responsibility of his/her own words or actions no matter the consequences. The normal person, instead, will only tell the parts that will put him/her into a positive light, and will take only portions of what the abnormal person said and use them against the abnormal person, twisting the truth to serve his purpose.
The problem here is that – since most of the people are normal – they will believe the normal person version, and will raise the stone against the abnormal person more than this one deserves. At this point, nothing from what the abnormal person would say in his/her defense, it would simply not matter.
The situation I have been through was even worse. The normal person – by the way: the snake in Lesson 6 – did all her poisoned speech and presented chunks of a discussion we had in private (which in the initial context were not against me, but she twisted them to seem like that) in a community which I could not access, so I simply could not defend myself. The normal people of that community never ever bothered to learn both sides of the story. Why would they do that? They simply took an unjust decision based what one of their kind told them.
The bad thing about this story is that it hurt at that time. Not anymore now.
The good thing about this story is that in the process I found out once again who is a real friend and stood by me in those times, and who only pretended to be my friend, but they fraternized with the snake.
Do I want to be such a person like the normal one described above? No! No way! But there’s another lesson I have learned – the truth of an old saying: “The one you won’t let die, won’t let you live.”
Till next time
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