Pt. 4 - Facts

There are facts,

Incontrovertible facts,

Truths that cannot be negated or rationalized away with enough wishful thinking.

As children we grow up believing that history is concrete, immovable. Paul Revere rode to wake the sleeping colonists in the spring of 1775. The Spanish American War began with the sinking of the USS Maine. Taft became the first president to throw out the first pitch of a baseball game. These are facts.

We have an inherent belief that given enough time and distance, the truth with invariably come to the light. The truth, we believe, cannot be buried, ignored, or obscured forever. This is a belief upon which our entire perception of history, government, and ethics are based. We stake our lives upon it.

The failure, though, is that while history often plays out in the ways we believe it should; that justice is meted out (though perhaps not as quickly as we might like), it finds its ultimate foundation on flawed humanity.

The truth is that facts, in practice, are malleable things, easily submerged if they prove themselves too convicting or distasteful to the general majority. One of mankind’s greatest feats is its ability to forget or ignore that which it views as displeasing or uncomfortable. Facts are uncomfortable things because they force us to face a reality outside of our own consciousness, outside of our own perception.

We have toyed so long with the absence of absolutes that now, when we so desperately long for them, they escape us. We are truly bearing the brunt of our philosophies. The weight is great indeed. Will we be able to bear it?

Five hundred years ago man knew that his destiny was shaped by providence, and though he might rebel against it, trusted that a divine hand loomed above. Now man knows and trusts only himself. We bear the scars of that trust more with every passing year.

Mankind trusts in its own civility, believing that all that is profitable is progress; that he is, of course, morally superior to his unenlightened ancestors. What demands that age naturally yields ethical advancement? Is such a law demonstrated by our personal behavior?

We are now our own accusers.

Our actions witness to our transgression.

We are what we always have been, only now our barbarism is unmasked, unveiled for the villainy that it is. The ‘enlightened’ may decry it but even his pursuit for righteousness is birthed in his own shrouded desires and personal lusts. As altruistic as his motives may seem they are rooted in conceit and selfishness as much as the bigot. We should not be surprised. We should be horrified.

This is a fact: Knowle Montgomery was not some archetypal supervillain or some twisted alien creature. He was a man who spoke the language men could hear. He did not in some subversive way manipulate or co-opt history, bending it to his will. He simply gave voice to what was already in the hearts of the people. Of some people that is. That is lost now. History will soon record him as some sort of anomaly; a character and the blame will pass off of the people and onto some caricature from the annuls of textbooks. The culpability will be shifted and given enough time, the bent content of our natures will reappear.

Unless we are already too far gone.

He was not a monster. We are the monsters.

This is a fact: the fires beyond Willow Run burn still.