Truth be Told

I am watching – on social media - a mother talking about her grief for her departed son. Only her eyelids are visible, for her eyes are downcast as she speaks. Nevertheless, they convey to me the image of two supermassive black holes roiling with pain-energy. Those waves of pain are reaching out from the impartial monitor and enveloping me in an empathetic gas cloud. 

With sparse words she conveys her emotions, her despair, and her struggle to gain a foothold and effect a comeback on the very, very slippery slope of personal loss. Words that may move a listener to tears. Or may not. For she is reaching out to the sisterhood of mothers across the world - who alone can understand her benumbing grief.

But at the end of it all, at the bottom of it all,  hers is a personal narrative of regeneration. Now her words are acquiring, albeit gradually, a tinge of hope, a ray of positivity.

No pain, no gain, they say. What can one gain from the pain of losing a loved one to death? Death is a depthless chasm only the dead can cross. Those left behind are left to cope as best they can. And mothers? Probably they are the worst- affected because the umbilical cord is cut only in reality, hardly ever on the emotional level.

How then do you regenerate yourself, as this particular mother did? By reaching out to others experiencing pain.

Your pain – others gain.

In alleviating others’ pain, you alleviate your own. That is the way of the wise, the ones who take themselves by their own hand (with a bit of help – or a lot of it - from outside) and turn back from the precipice of anguish. This mother’s long story of how she was devastated and how she snatched her own life from the jaws of another’s death has been conveyed in just a few words. Long story short. In an unprecedented way, perhaps.

 From her few choked words, one listening to her could learn to stop thinking of oneself and start thinking of, and living for and serving others who are still thrashing around  in their private self-spun webs of pain.

But, this blog is not as much about pain as it is about words. In today’s world, there is an all-out, clangorous War of The Words.

Why do we see such a determined effort, world-wide, to use words as weapons to inflict pain? To ensure gain for self or for some other vested interest? There are many who have made it their business and their "principle" in life,  to use words to misrepresent things-as-they-really-are. To mock at truth, at fact and figures. Because they feel they have the power to turn the truth on its head. Because there are many who will hear those words, but will be unable, or unwilling, or maybe even defiantly unwilling, to listen to the lies that those words convey.

Today, the ability and the willingness of the reading public, the hearing audiences, the hearing-and-seeing-simultaneously social-media viewers, is seriously on trial.

Words are being hijacked, language ransomed. It is the consumers of these lies who have to free themselves in order to enable and empower themselves to consume the right thing. To consume truth. And not lies-disguised-as-truth, however orchestrated may be the presentation of lies disguised as truth.

That is the way to reclaim our freedom, and the way to remain worthy inheritors of all the freedoms we today enjoy.