For real

“This one will find out. When he throws it in my face, I’ll tell him a few truths—hard, exact, and properly spoken.” And yet how elusive even the humblest, most provisional truth proves to be. Always filtered through the lens we choose to look through. Lenses that fog with bewilderment, resentment, anger—so common in these parts. Passions unleashed with ferocity against the outrages of the others, never against those of our own. From such invective we fashion innocence, and with it a serene irresponsibility toward what is actually happening.

To speak ill of others is to reassure ourselves of our own goodness, our own worth. As everyone knows, blame always belongs to the present government—or to the previous one, which allegedly left everything sunk in mud. The spirit of the sect. We remain forever on the sidelines. Here, the State “owes us everything,” though in truth we have always given it very little. Our catalogue of rights grows endlessly; that of our duties quietly withers.

“The truth will set you free,” we were told. And so we were summoned to this uncertain pursuit of what is true, a journey without destination. We search restlessly for naked truth—about the world, our country, life, ourselves. Yet we rarely admit that, in the end, we may be capable only of grasping partial truths: relative, fragile, always open to revision. This, too, is democracy—a collective narrative shaped through contrast, endlessly rewritten.

Human truths, always constructed only halfway, must never be mistaken for half-truths, those convenient distortions that proliferate in daily life, in politics, in the press.

Everywhere there is a hunger for clean truths: truths upheld by lucid reasoning and unclouded feeling; truths resting on solid ground; paradoxical truths—disarming, humane, free of solemnity; truths well spoken; human truths. At times sad truths; at others, truths that strike like a clenched fist. How difficult. Truly.