Give me Librium or Give me Meth
At the end of 2023, my girlfriend and I drove from our home in Oaxaca, Mexico to Tapachula, a city on the border of Guatemala. As we drove down the highway, we passed tens of thousands of refugees walking the other way. Many were Hispanic or Haitian, but many were also East African, and North or East Asian. They walked in groups, they walked alone - for eight hours, without interruption, we passed them walking along the road.
This did not surprise us. A migration wave heading north through Mexico had been news for months. We had already seen its outliers travelling through our small town on the coast of Oaxaca. The magnitude of the caravan was staggering, but not astonishing. We had heard the numbers. Even in America, they were starting to find out. Two and a half million people crossed the US border illegally in 2023. Many were flown, free of charge, to a state of their choice. In New York, some were put up in five-star hotels. There was a highly-publicised crime wave perpetrated by illegal immigrants. Many of the crimes were reprimanded less severely than people who used the term ‘illegal immigrant’. There were talks to offer free healthcare to illegal immigrants, even while American-born war veterans languished on the streets.
I never quite understood why the American government would choose to alienate their voters so severely. Surely they could not be ignorant of what was happening at the border. Since most of the immigrants were being shipped to Democrat-voting states, it seemed the situation would jeopardise the re-election of a Democrat president. Add to that 100,000 children separated from their parents as they crossed the border, the billions of dollars drug cartels were earning for organising border runs, the inflow of Fentanyl through a compromised border, the abysmal treatment of migrant labour, the downward pressure it put on everyone else’s wages, and the undeniable evidence of human trafficking going on, and it seemed an untenable position.
It was clear Biden was, at least in large part, responsible. He had vowed in 2020 to abolish Trump’s hard border. One of his first executive orders was to cease construction on the border wall. But why? To what end? This year it came to light that the number of electors each state could appoint to the Electoral College was based not on the number of citizens resident in that state, but the total number of people, including non-citizens. This seemed nefarious enough, but now the Democratic Party is blocking legislation that would ban non-citizens from voting in a federal election. It seems too corrupt to be true, too open and blatant, but is there anything left in American politics to surprise us?
In the midst of it all, people have filled the time pointing fingers. In 2021 Joe Biden nominated Vice-President Kamala Harris as the person in charge of the border, probably to distance himself from the issue. Now she is the party’s candidate for President, and the media is racing to make sure no one believes that she was ever in charge of the border. Axios, an American news website, claimed this week that Harris had “never actually” been called a “border czar.” At least a dozen Twitter accounts responded to this with a screenshot of a 2021 article by Axios itself that called Harris a “border czar.” Axios responded, some days later, that they were among several dishonourable websites who had mislabelled Harris a border czar. And it all seemed so Soviet!
What happened to sincerity? What happened to the truth? Surely, of all careers, one enters journalism out of love for truth. Who ever convinced journalists that they must subjugate the truth to some political cause? Someone or something must have convinced them, because without a commitment to the truth there is no way of coming to any valid judgement oneself. Without dedication to truth we are totally awash in a sea of conflicting possibilities. Without truth we are defenceless.
On New Year’s Eve in 2017 I did an all-night meditation with my teacher. During the night, again and again, I asked myself what my resolution would be for the new year. Again and again the answer came to me: ‘Satyam’, which means truth.
I had always had an uneasy relationship with the truth. By the end of my youth I had come to believe that the truth was unnecessary and unsafe, and that it was better to negotiate with facts than to admit them. I camouflaged myself behind half-truths and untruths. I thought I would be safer among people if I presented an appealing front. It had become such a habit with me that I never questioned it.
Starting in 2018 (before that, in fact), I did question it. I set myself the task, for a day, then a week, then a month, of telling the truth exclusively. Of course, as soon as I set myself the task, every possible obstacle arose before it. People asked difficult questions, I got into uncomfortable conversations; one time, within hours of me deciding to tell the truth for a day, I found myself having to explain to the police why I had bought a concession ticket. I knew I was entitled to a concession, being a university student, but I did not own a student card, because I had never gone to the trouble of getting one. It would have been easiest to lie, say I had a card, and deal with the matter by mail. But I found myself trying to explain the whole conviluted situation. The more you talk to the police, the more they treat you like a criminal. It became a tangled mess, and I lied in the end to get out of it. As recompense, I spent an hour on the porch doing a particular yoga exercise.
With time, truth became a habit. For a while it was an obsession. I would refuse to say I would arrive at a dinner at 7pm in case I was ten minutes late. I would be fanatically precise with details. But of course my fanaticism softened - the point had never been to live as factually as an encyclopaedia; the point had always been, deep down, to learn that I was safe. We only lie because we are afraid, and lies have a tendency to make us fearful. We must look out through the lies we have built to protect ourselves, and they distort our vision. We find ourselves mistrusting our own judgement, unable to distinguish good from bad and right from wrong. We become subservient to our lies, and must constantly struggle to reinforce them.
Telling the truth is an act of faith. It is the decision to stop squabbling to protect ourselves from monsters we mis-see in our own shadows; it is the act of falling backwards, and letting the world catch us. If you tell the truth you have nothing to worry about. You don’t have to plot endlessly to hold your world together; you let God take care of the direction of things, and simply tell things as you see them. You realise that your perspective is just a perspective, and it is always right but never Right. You find you have nothing to defend. People who lie - above all people who lie to themselves - can be identified by the fact that they attack other people’s opinions, because those opinions threaten the false truths they cling to. Nothing can threaten real Truth. In truth, there is nothing to threaten. Things are, and our perspectives are just tinsel. Truth makes things simple.
In yogic philosophy, Satyam (truth) is only subordinate to Ahimsa (non-violence). One may only tell an untruth if it saves or protects. But this is rocky ground. The knowledge of what is good and what is wrong is only given - partially - to very few people. The rest of us tend to truck in comfort, and think it goodness. I think truth comes before contrived kindness, because contrived kindness is often a hiding place for cowardice. How many relationships are spoilt because the people in them are afraid to tell the truth? How many people are torn apart because they believe that what happens inside them is to be divided (arbitrarily) into ‘good things’ and ‘bad things’, the ‘good’ things amplified, and the ‘bad’ things repressed? You feel a sudden surge of rage - very good. It is part of nature. Admit it, let it go - don’t try to shunt it back into yourself. Don’t hide it. If you want to be a hateful person, the surest path there is to deny your anger. For hatred is frozen anger; hatred is the anger we never admitted or expressed.
There are countless examples along these lines. Relationships are deep to the level that two people tell the truth. You love a person as well as you know them, and if you don’t share the truth with them, they don’t know you, nor do you know them. Love shrivels where people lie, and people lie because they are afraid. If you want to revive a floundering relationship, say all the things you are afraid to say. Slake off the plaque and throw it onto truth’s flame. Let Truth deal with it. Truth begets love, inevitably. If you lie, the tartar will eventually poison you.
But truth is a slow flame. It burns softly, and never confronts us with more than we can handle. Rumi said if we saw the Truth in its full glory, it would electrocute us. The truth eats into us slowly: slowly, one by one, we admit things to ourselves. We clean our eyes one wipe at a time. There is a brief hiatus - then we admit what we have seen. The inner truth becomes outer admission. We release the wall of frantic camouflage. We set ourselves at ease, and set others at ease with us. Truth will set you free, said Jesus; I add that truth is freedom. All good things converge - truth is beauty is love is freedom is joy is happiness. One path to all of these - perhaps the most workable path, though certainly not the easiest - is simply to tell the truth.
Cape Town - Palm Vista
Anderson AI
Cape Town - Palm Vista — WALL+PASTE