Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Truth is powerful.

A little over a month ago I was at the Women's March in Dublin.

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There were at least five thousand people marching with me in Dublin, and I was marching with five million people around the world that day. Making our voices heard and our presence felt, making clear that we dissent and being clear that we have better alternatives. It was a good day, of quietly spoken and loudly shouted opposition to an unfair world and propositions for a better one. Those messages are as strongly felt now, they grow stronger and are made more necessary with each passing day. Let's not forget that experience and that presence, that massive, massive force. We'd do well to pay more attention to and take more sustenance from it, today and each day that feels bleaker than the last.

I think a major mistake is being made in that we - the media, the general public, commentators, writers, as well as those who have and stand for alternatives - keep playing the tune of a man we claim to despise and whose message for the world is destructive and dangerous. I won't mention his name as you already know it and it's better for everyone if it's not said. Instead of ignoring a man who will do anything for attention, we keep giving him the attention he craves for doing and saying things we claim to disapprove of. As we all know from childhood, this is not how to deal with an attention-seeking, ignorant, loud-mouthed bully. He appears deeply insecure despite being immensely powerful, and insecure people are very dangerous. We continually allow ourselves to be distracted by what he wants us to be distracted by. We ignore and fail to oppose the truly destructive things he is doing because we focus on the latest outrage he has concocted, particularly when that distraction is a nonsensical, inconsequential thing he's said or claimed is true, or indeed claimed is fake. We need to focus instead on opposing the actions that are truly causing damage and maintaining that focus unwaveringly until things change, and at the same time maintaining our efforts to create and strengthen better alternatives such as equality, fairness, solidarity, inclusiveness and sustainability.

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A first stage is to oppose his policies and everything he stands for. Examples were evident at the Women's March, with signs such as these reading "Love Tr*mps Hate" and "Untr*mp the world". At least these are a step in the right direction towards subverting his message, even inverting it, rather than parroting it wholesale with neutered shrieks of outrage attached, usually honed into Twitter-length bon mots that evaporate even as they are typed. But we need to go further than that. Just visible in the background was one of the most powerful messages I saw at the Women's March:

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"Truth is powerful and it prevails." I believe this. Perhaps it would be more accurate, if cynical, to say I believe the first part and fight for the second. Unfashionable as it is to say I think we need to focus on the truth. There is a truth. The truth. There are as many different perspectives on truth as there are people in the world, and all of those perspectives are part of the truth, but in my old-fashioned view, there is the truth, which includes all of those different views, different realities, different knowledges. And truth is different to falsehood, to lies, to fictions, to unrealities. I think we need to focus more on what is true. I think we need to do this particularly now when so much of what is true is under attack, and when so much of what is false is being lauded and elevated as all that matters. While simultaneously we are told that there is no difference between truth and falsehood, that what is true is actually false, that only the lies are real. We need to keep telling the truth, about the world as it is. And about how it could be. We need to voice too the truths that are not often heard. Don't let your post-modern sensibilities and the contemporary uncoolness of truth blind you to the dangers of believing habitual liars who happen to be very powerful. We need to refuse to be distracted by their fireworks, 'facts' and funny stories. Don't grant this man and his many associates the power to tell you what to think about, or what to think about it. I suggest ignoring the majority of nonsense that he wants you to be distracted and outraged by but ineffectual about. Instead focus on what matters, and remain focused on that. Focus on what is true. And then focus on doing something real about it.

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