Where are the Answers?

October 12, 2010

If you follow my blogs, you might conclude I have problems with consistency but let me assure you there is nothing wrong with my intentions—which is why I’d love see an entire catalog of pithy and entertaining writing on this blogsite. It’s not there, of course, and writing-wise, I don’t have a lot to show for the last 10 months except a couple of articles about a friend, Grant Greenhalgh, who is 93 and was a business partner of Spencer W. Kimball in the Gila Valley.

I’ve been in the creative doldrums. This means avoidance, horror, frozen fingers hovering over the keyboard. It means brain-body disconnect. The thoughts stop at my wrists. But I finally understand something that happened to one of my sons in the seventh grade. I was at work when his art teacher called. “Your son told me he can’t do today’s assignment because his hand is paralyzed,” she said.

“What?” You never tell a doctor, particularly a gynecologist whose knowledge is about things below the belt, that her son’s hand is paralyzed. It starts an entire cascade of catastrophies: ruptured aneurysms; esoteric kinds of epilepsy; scorpion stings . . .

I was racing through possibilities when she said “Here, you better talk to him.”

“Mom, my hand won’t move.” His voice was strong and clear. No mumbling or stuttering.
This was the salesman son, the one who could get a telephone pole to spring for fundraiser chocolate bars for the peewee soccer team. Was this a salespitch? His mouth moved. He articulated speech. He was oriented to time, place and person.

“Which hand?”

“The right one. Uhmmm.” He grunted. “I’m trying to make it move,” he said and it was the faintest uptick of hopefulness in his voice that gave him away.

“You have to do your assignment.”

The teacher returned to the line. “I’ve never seen this one before,” she said and couldn’t hold back. “I’m sorry.” She was laughing.

But enough about consistency, intentions and writer’s block: it’s an incurable disease that occasionally goes into remission. The fact is I am intimidated by the blank page and its requirement for honesty and impeccable truth. Once in print my ideas are no longer only mine.

Which brings me to the real issue of today’s blog which is my own timid entry into a new arena of debate and comment.

I want truth. I want big chunks of truth that are not distorted by prevailing winds of commentary and media bias. Where is it?

I ask for feedback. Am I wrong in my perception that there is new sprung viciousness and deceit in many of our news sources which apparently care little for the honesty I fuss so much about? Am I right to be appalled by the legislative thuggery of our government? By an arrogant assault on my intelligence and concern about my country?

I want honest answers about the critical mass of poverty without having to get degrees in Economics and Sociology. I worry about those people who can’t read or don’t read, who make emotional decisions before they make informed decisions because they don’t know how to become or care to be informed.

Regarding recent legislation, does the hope of an end result really justify the means to get there? Isn’t this a dangerous philosophical position because it ruthlessly jeopardizes tradition, principle, dignity and values?

I realize I am being vague and abstract. It is because I don’t want to make a mistake, to transmit bad information or err in my reportage. And, perhaps I have been overly influenced by a book I am reading, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip Zimbardo. Even so, I highly recommend it, and suggest, should you decide to read this book about our vulnerabilities to situation and peer influence, that you also read verse 4 of section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants, which is a prophetic utterance about our time. In consequence of evils and designs which do and will exist in the hearts of conspiring men in the last days . . .