Shining Thru

The wind blows gently along the tops of the trees

Like a whisper in the ear, it gently passes not leaving a trace

Simply an impression

You wonder if it’s real, if it really happened

Did you just imagine or is it revealed?

Thinking too hard about what you can’t prove

What you can’t be sure of…

The hidden untruths

Lie deep within the unread rules

The gaps between the lines that you can’t write on

Something that is there but unseen

So many things in life

So many unseen futures

No where to turn where there isn’t a reckoning

It doesn’t matter if the glass is half full if it never comes off the shelf

Leave the things you know to yourself

Or fight through all of the unrecoverable facts

Thinking, breathing, living

Who ever said that the history books were correct?  What makes us think that we can say beyond a shadow of a doubt what happened hundreds or thousands of years ago on this planet?  Even once we had the benefit of writing, most of the languages have been altered so much that it is sometimes impossible to detect what the author was actually trying to say.  Even stories written in plain English were not always accurate, we have no way of knowing if a person was telling the truth or if they were highly imaginative and enjoyed writing fiction in a believable way to entertain the people around them. 

There are so many stories that have been false and yet have made it into the history books, to the point that many historians have refused to truly examine other possibilities…and it’s starting to be noticed.  Especially the lie about Columbus “discovering” America.  I’ve never heard anything more ridiculous, as more and more proof of this inaccuracy is revealed, why is it that we are still teaching this story as if it was fact.  Why are we still celebrating a holiday in honor of this rapist and robber?  Especially when there is a lot of proof that is emerging to suggest if not prove that there were many Europeans as well as Asians here before Columbus even thought about making his famous voyage.

Why is it that people deny the facts that are set right in front of them?  Why is it that people don’t ever want to look for what could have been and just accept what they are told about the past?  The past is what makes us who we are, don’t we want to know what the true past of our country is?  I simply don’t understand why it’s so hard for some people to believe that we may have made a mistake about what happened on this planet hundreds of years before we were on it.

What makes us believe what we hear from certain sources?  Why is it that we take certain information for fact?  Most people hear a word used and never stop to wonder if the word was used correctly or not.  I myself am guilty of this, I hear a new word and remember it in context, never stopping to look up the actual definition of the word.  Habits like these have led to a lot of misinformation in our society.  However, if everyone around you has the same misconceptions, are they still misconceptions?  Or do they become fact at that point?  After all, the purpose of words is to communicate, if communication is achieved, doesn’t that validate the words that were used? 

Although, I think this theory of validity does work with words and the development of language, there are a lot of things that I don’t think it could work with.  For example, history; you can be taught all sorts of misconceptions and probably have been, and you may even choose to still believe those things, but your beliefs don’t make it truth or fact, just simply a misconception.  Your beliefs can’t change cold, hard facts, but they can change your perceptions of those facts, creating your own reality.  A world that only you can decide what the facts are, and what you choose to ignore.

So why then do schools and people in general continue to teach misconceptions of information that have been around and been exposed for years and some for decades?  More importantly, why haven’t we, as a society, learned to question what we’re being taught?