How It Starts - Oct 20 2024

 

How It Starts

Oct 30 2024



This is how it starts.

The little fib

unheeded drip

what you took for indigestion.

The thin edge of the wedge

little by little

inching in.

The lie of omission

that seemed innocent enough,

but soon entangles you

in the sticky web of deception

you’ve spun for yourself.

Until, before you know it

you’re making them up;

lies of commission

digging you deeper in.

I’ve seen bowls carved in rock

from water falling

drip-by-drip

year after year

over countless millennia.

But we are short-lived

and too impatient for that.

Seen heart attacks

that were ignored;

passed off

as either eating too fast,

or the fried onions

when you couldn’t say no.

But some things start big,

and repetition

hammers them home.

A lie

so fantastic

it must be true.

A lie

everyone else believes

so you do too.

A lie

from someone you trust

and don’t want to lose.

Some say there are no absolute truths.

But perfect lies exist;

delusions

so all-encompassing

they suck you in completely,

a confidence

so shocking

you suspend disbelief.

After all, secret knowledge is powerful,

and those who possess it

look decidedly smug

have a strut to their walk.

You can see it in their eyes,

a mischievous twinkle

that dares you to ask

but swears they’d never tell.

The second stanza tells you that I was initially going to try to make this poem small and personal. But I wasn’t feeling that, and it seems the political inevitably wormed its way in.

The MAGA movement has brought with it echoes of the fascism of the 30s, which was a decade before our forbears eventually had to pay the price in WW2. Trump has resurrected Goebbels' tactic of the Big Lie, which is so relentlessly repeated and so preposterous that it must be true. (“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”)

We haven’t learned. People now are as credulous as ever. And still as susceptible to the superficial charm of the populists’ charismatic leader. Still as willing to demonize “the other”. Still as receptive to simplistic solutions for complicated problems. Still as excited to chant the slogans, to belong, and to be reassured. Still as frightened of change.

So lies are on my mind. As well as the prospect of a frog-in-boiling-water slippery slope into authoritarianism.

There are absolute truths. And one of them appears to be that people who are ignorant of history are bound to repeat it. (To paraphrase George Santayana’s prescient quote.)

(I also recently discovered a slow drip. So as evidenced by the opening stanza, this also helped set me off on this poem. It went undetected for who knows how long, and left a real mess!)