We live in a world where people tell you they didn’t say something they said, even if you have a video of them saying it. And people make videos of you saying things you didn’t say.
Sadly, there are plenty of people — people with great power — who are awful enough to want to do these things to us for as long as it takes to gain more power.
Truth is gone.
Like an island sinking or (a more apt metaphor) a glacier breaking apart, its pieces drift away from each other.
Instead of one agreed-upon place of truth — newscasts, universities, libraries — we have the Internet, we have social media, which guide us into earshot of hundreds of unvetted mouthpieces telling us different stories. Our part in this? In the same way we regard religion: we assume the story that we are told is the right one.
To be a writer of history, an authoritative voice that is followed, you need not be qualified; you need not be well-read; you need not have lived through the experience you’re covering or talked to anyone who has; you need not be divine.
You need only be compelling to watch.
Our esteemed storytellers’ top credentials have become charisma. No, not even that. Just, spectacle. Giving us something that’s hard to stop watching.
The jesters have taken over the castle while the King is off somewhere in a separate wing, under a stack of blankets, coughing and wheezing, bruised and beaten.
We’ve pummeled Knowledge to death through our nonchalant tapping of “like” and “subscribe” buttons.
Unfortunately — and it hurts even to write this — a single, trusted Truth will never return.
You can’t put a glacier back together.
There is no boat coming. The people with boats, they all own houses, and fireplaces, and heated indoor swimming pools with faux-fiberglass icebergs. They make the videos. They make the buttons. They edit our minds.
And we, the masses who far outnumber the architects, we’re dying of cold.
Our only hope of survival, as we stand alone on these drifting pieces of ice, is selfless, even ridiculous, acts that make no sense.
Jumping into the water.
Breaking off a piece of our iceberg and leaving it behind.
Fishing with our hands.
Screaming at the top of our lungs.
Diving deep deep deep down into the cold.
For, it is only through these ridiculous acts that we may find each other.
In chaos, there can still be kindness.
And kindness is, and always will be, the kindling that generates hope.
Perhaps, under this murky, ice-cold water, tangled up in the subterranean roots of an unknown species we’ve yet to discover, there is an ingredient we all need, perhaps the drifting is how we will find it.
Or perhaps, even more far-fetched than that, if we all begin to scream and swim, we will eventually hear each other, and that will be enough to make us move in the right direction: toward, not away.