Inimical Inspiration 7/01/09

It is dangerous to speak the truth. It is more dangerous not to.

DB - The Vagabond
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Come in, sit you down.
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"He who'd make his fellow creatures wise, should always gild the philosophic pill" wrote W. S. Gilbert (of Gilbert & Sullivan).

Why is speaking the truth so dangerous? Because many people don't want to hear the truth and they would rather kill the messenger than listen to the message.

Why don't they want to hear the truth? Fear. The truth may upset their preconceived notions of the way things are, and their habitual ways of thinking. Or the truth may go contrary to what they have been told by someone they love and respect. Or the truth may expose something of which they are ashamed, something that is hiding. There is even the compassionate need sometimes to avoid speaking the truth so as not to hurt someone else.

Then why is it more dangerous to not speak the truth? Truth has a way of revealing itself one way or another. Sometimes the truth is a warning. If I don't speak the truth someone or something will, and thus take the blows.

I was walking down a street in lower Manhattan one day. There was a man approaching me from the other direction. As he got close I noticed another man coming out of the ground floor of a warehouse building with two long, large, sharp, metal beams on his shoulder. The two men could not see each other. I could see a potential injury about to happen, I held up my hand to the man on the sidewalk and barked at him to stop. a second later I did the same to the man with the metal beams. They both looked at me as if I was a mad man. Then I motioned for the man with the beams to come forward. He did and when the two men saw each other they realized what I had done and thanked me.

Over the past several years intelligent, knowledgeable people have been warning about the follies of bloated mortgages, insecure loans, junk bonds, skyrocketing interest rates and the instability of the market. Many people treated those warnings as just so much negativity and anti-Americanism, while so-called authorities were preaching the opposite. But some people heeded the warnings, which were not pleasant to hear, and converted their assets, opting for frugal living and low risk investments, thus averting the dangers. Others drowned in debt.

If you see a crack in the dam and you tell people, most of them will laugh at you and accuse you of being a lying troublemaker. But someone may listen, investigate and plug up the crack. If you see the crack in the dam and don't tell people, someday you're going to drown your neighbors.

DB
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Have warm thoughts, but not too warm.