Just the Facts

"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please." -Mark Twain quoted by Rudyard Kipling in From Sea to Shining Sea

It may be just me, but I believe that we live in a world of wishful thinking.  We wish we could live in a non-violent world.  We wish children were not abused.  We wish we could lose ten pounds.  We wish we could celebrate the day when the last smoker grinds out his last cigarette.  We wish . . .

But it seems to me that in our wishing and hoping, we tend to ignore the building blocks of all theories--the facts.  The lowly fact today gets lost in the mountain of data we produce each minute of every hour of every day.  The data mounts, but often the fact gets lost.  Isn't it time that we like Joe Friday in the classic television drama Dragnet started saying, "Just the facts Ma'am.  Just the facts."

Like a needle in a haystack as high as Everest, we cannot hope to ferret out the proven or provable fact.  Buried somewhere in the pile of dirt is the gold.  Somewhere in there is the fact on which we can rely.  Somewhere, the proverbial kernel of truth lies under all the trash.

It reminds me of the wisdom of the young.  When my daughter Ariel and son Skye were pre-schoolers, Skye asked his mom, “Where do babies come from Mommy?”  Patricia had prepared for this moment and launched into a lengthy explanation when Ariel clamped both hands over both ears and pleaded, “Don’t tell us Mom.  We’re too young!”

Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men is famous for his superb delivery of “You can’t handle the truth.”  Perhaps this is true today.  We hold our unexamined theories tightly.  We cherish our ideas.  We join our political parties and choose our church and sign up to support our favorite cause.  We do a lot of wishful thinking, but we do not want to hear the facts. 

"How empty is theory in the presence of fact!"-Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court