NOT SUPPORTED BY ALL THE FACTS

Like the little Dutch boy who plugged a leak in the levee with his finger, had he pulled it out the deluge from the sea would have swept everything away: I don’t want to pull my finger for the same fear. Something this morning led me to a John Muir quote, one that I keep at my finger tips. It has been paraphrased over and again but whatever form it takes, I employ it. In so many words he said, “Whenever you try to pick out any one thing, you find it is attached to everything else in the universe.” Framing simple questions is easy but not so the answers. In my experience, the closer one examines an issue there are many more new issues and concerns raised than there are resolutions. I am suspicious of those who want a simple, universal truth that will serve the moment. The hang up is, how much proof is required to satisfy your need and how does one remain consistent with the frequency of unanticipated issues? 

I use an electronic tuner with my guitar. The face glows red behind the note I’m after and when the needle lines up, everything turns green: that string is in tune or close enough that I don’t care. It meets my need. But making decisions that change your life, change other people’s lives, I take that with a greater sense of responsibility. As the gravity increases so does my reservation with simple, universal truths. 

‘This American Life’ is an NPR radio program. True stories are researched and retold. They reveal the broad range of the simple and the complex in the whole of Human Experience. Today’s story was of an 18 year-old woman in Washington who was raped in her apartment. Her backstory was stereotypic if nothing else; a ward of the court all of her life, shuffling from home to home with foster parents. The last two years were with a good, supporting woman and they became friends. At 18, she moved to an apartment nearby and they continued to work at her transition to independence. After the rape the police did an interview and rape kit and began an investigation. 

From the beginning, her story was inconsistent, contradicting all of the normal responses and behaviors associated with sexual assault victims. Quickly the focus turned from identifying the perpetrator to the credibility of the victim. In the end she was outed publicly and humiliated, advised that she was lucky not to have been prosecuted for filing a false report. Even her foster mother rejected her. With no reason to remain, she moved to another town. Several years later, in Colorado, two rape cases were reported in a short time span that matched the Washington rapist’s unusual mode of operation, likewise the questionable behavior and testimony of the victims. Through a series of coincidental and highly unlikely circumstances, the perpetrator was captured along with damning photographs of the Washington victim in his computer.

The story takes a sharp turn from the shamed, wannabe victim to condescending but respectable, well intended people and their painful revelation. They had been so wrong about something so serious, something they had been so sure about. The story ends well. Relationships were reconciled but the Washington victim had moved on and was living a new, better life; no need to dig up old bones. The courts awarded her some restitution, not a big windfall like men released from death row after decades of wrongful incarceration but enough for her to gain closure. 

So here I am like the Dutch boy, fearing the deluge; tugging on one of Muir’s strands and feeling all the universe tugging back. Too many stories, too many ideas to chase at one time but they keep tugging anyway. I understand that we (people) act on emotion long before we resort to reason and I try to keep balance in that regard but then maybe, probably, that’s just a perception I indulge myself. 

Sources of wisdom (truth) are infinite and nobody can absorb all of them. That’s what Jonathan Haidt calls, ‘The Paradox of Abundance’. Donald Rumsfeld appealed to that principle with the ‘Weapons Of Mass Destruction” debacle but his credibility was in question, not the principle itself. There are things I don’t know and I don’t know what they are. So I have to rely on understanding that hangs on 1st or 2nd hand sources but in either case it has to be sorted through numerous inherited and acquired, emotional/psychological filters before I can perceive a reasonable path. 

Culture is not something we can manipulate arbitrarily for the desired result: the Law of Unanticipated Consequences is much more reliable than we are. Short story; ‘Shit Happens.’ We react to our culture, not the other way. But that’s another strand of Muir’s universe and I hadn’t planned on going there. He also said, “It is easier to feel than to realize or in any way explain, the grandeur of Yosemite.” My sense is that he would expand that view to include the maelstrom of civilized life. Likewise he said, “The world, we are told, was made for man - a presumption not supported by all the facts.” Here I go again. I wonder how I would have reacted to the Washington victim’s story. I’ve come to take seriously any wrong-doing, reported by any woman, against any man. That deep-seated conviction is rooted in emotional-feeling more so than in logic; not something one can rationalize in a vacuum. Then again, pushing back against your own culture is terribly difficult. Thanks be for our mothers, our source of wisdom for what is fair and for the wisdom of altruism, of needing and helping each other. Thanks be for our fathers too but their virtue comes on another of Muir’s strands and I can’t plug the levee now, much less add a new challenge.