Truth and Consequences
The driver of the logging truck had to squeeze around us on a tight, two-lane coastal highway, and as the last wheels passed us, he yelled out his window, “Gawd, I’d love to be able to just run you stupid cyclists over.”
It’s not the craziest thing we’ve ever heard while riding our bikes on busy roadways, but it certainly characterizes a particular frame of mind that has become more easily expressed out loud in recent years.
I hear this sentiment in gravelly, old-man voices, which isn’t totally unexpected, but also in voices that shouldn’t carry so much heaviness from hard living yet. I hear it in female voices too.
To borrow a common phrase from the culture wars, they say the quiet part out loud.
Consequences are physical, psychological and philosophical, and they’ve probably been with us since whatever relative we split off from handed us the keys to the kingdom and peaced out. We’ve just made them more elaborate and custom fit them to our needs as we’ve grown to 8 billion of us.
We seem to absolutely hate consequences at present, at least the ones that prevent us from running stupid cyclists over, beating another driver to death for cutting us off or simply shooting those we don’t agree with.
While I deeply understand the human desire to exact punishment on other humans for perceived slights and perverse ideologies, (who of us has not wished for something bad to happen to someone who has hurt us?) it has crossed over from karma to malevolent death wish.
I’ve heard more than one person say they wish for a Civil War so they can unleash their home arsenal on all of their hated neighbors. And not just on TV, this was someone I know very well.
We’ve come to hate two things that are part of the fabric of society, truth and consequences.
We are firmly in the post-truth era, and you can see that play out across social media channels as much as you like at any hour of the day. And consequences, the bulwark of our societal agreements, are starting to crack.
You’ll still go to prison if you were to unload your AR-15 into your neighbor over a political dispute, but not everyone who kills people these days will face consequences, and every time they don’t, they set a precedent.
A certain ex-president has eschewed truth and evaded consequences his entire life, and he brought those tactics to the very top of American society, the place in which our laws are made and the societal agreements that hold us together enshrined.
It looks sexy to many, the abandonment of truth and consequences, but it’s two tiered. If you’re poor, a Person of Color, LGBTQ or any marginalized member of our society, you will always face full consequences of our societal agreement.
As we test these boundaries and push against them, the wealthiest among us are finding the cracks and exploiting them. All the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And in a post-truth world, they’re trying to convince us that these foundational pieces of our society are open for interpretation and manipulatable if you have the money.
Indictments mean very little today. Like a Chess move where your king is in peril briefly from a distance, but a side move removes all threat. Even a conviction today doesn’t hold the weight it used to in the public mindset. Consequences have always been what holds us together. Without them, we slip into an anything goes mindset that we used to see happening in 3rd-world countries on the evening news.
What’s the consequence of not passing an infrastructure bill to improve the nation’s infrastructure? Bridges collapse, dams burst, roadways disintegrate. What’s the consequence of not holding someone accountable for destabilizing democracy in America by trying to overturn an election? Quite simply, the eventual destruction of democracy.
Therein lies the rub. The consequence here is not the one meted out on those who participated in trying to overturn an election. It’s not prison, it’s not house arrest, it’s not fines or loss of property. No, the consequence here is the loss of our democracy, the loss of the types of freedoms we have progressed toward for 300 years.
Truth is dead. And we’re about to experience the consequence of that killing.
When my friends complain about government overreach, I try to remind them that they are the government. This is often difficult for them to comprehend, because the government to them is some entity that can pry the gun from their cold, dead hands.
We have forgotten that we are all America, not just one political ideology. The truth of what we are as a nation has been gunned down by the culture wars, and the consequences of that are upon us. But we don’t like consequences and won’t accept that they’re a necessary glue that holds this beautiful, fragile experiment together.
Sadly, we’ve played at this for hundreds of thousands of years. We’ve built magnificent empires and buried them under sand. We’ve stood up one experimental form of government after another just to fold them into history like so many kings, queens, emperors and presidents.
When we’ve burned it all to the ground, then we face the truth again and accept the consequences needed to re-establish ourselves as a family, a community, a city, a state, a kingdom, a country or an empire, and we climb the stairs of progress until we lose sight of the truth and come to detest the consequences.
A bigger consequence than we have faced before looms before us. It is the consequence of our progress, the consequence of our denial, the consequence of our inaction, the consequence of our selfishness. A consequence from which we cannot escape. Perhaps the inevitable end of this endless cycle of truth and consequences.
