The Truth is Not Popular

I've spent pretty much the last four decades wondering why the truth isn't more popular.  As a matter of fact, it's not just unpopular, it's downright despised.  Try to find a better way to empty a room or enrage any number of people present than to speak the truth.  I've had to learn this the hard way.  As a small child I was always asking my parents "WHY?"  The way things were supposed to be seemed fairly straightforward, rational and sensible to me; I just couldn't understand why other people had such different ideas about it.  As a pragmatic, practical person of principle, I have always felt a strong need to "defend the truth," or at least make sure people were aware of it.  After all, it sets you free, right?  Well......., not exactly.  Maybe in the long run, but in the immediate future it just gets you in trouble; it can even get you killed.  Look what happened to Jesus, Joan of Arc, William Wallace, and any number of characters on the Twilight Zone.  My therapist keeps trying to convince me that truth is relative.  She is not having much luck, although she has finally gotten me to consider that it is somewhat changeable.  As I have grown older, I can see that what was true for me at one stage in my life is no longer true for me now.  We change.  The world changes around us.  I still believe however that there are a few (notice I said FEW) absolutes.  I've been accused lots of times of what they call "black and white" thinking.  This means "either-or" scenarios, or not allowing there to be any "gray areas."  I admit I'm much more comfortable with the idea of things being either this way or that way, but at this stage of my life I now see this as my own attempts to put life as we know it into tidy categories for my own sense of comfort.  While there are principles that if we come to understand and live by them WILL make our lives easier, and I would call those "truth," any well-meaning individual, no matter how hard they try, can never force another individual to "see the truth."  Why?  The most obvious reason is that we all resist hearing "the truth" because we've already got a "truth" that we like just fine, thank you very much.  At worst, this is called denial, and leads to all sorts of evils and personal suffering, and at best it's called knowing yourself, and what your values are, which is a good thing.  So after years of pointing out the elephant in the room during my stints in college, church leadership, local politics, working for a non-profit, a government agency, and in all the groups I have ever been a member of, I have decided that although the elephant may seem obvious to me, I cannot save anyone from being trampled.  Everyone has to see their own elephant.  Or something like that....