Political Growth
As a young child, I remember playing in our family room, while my father watched the evening news at almost trancelike attention. On occasion, he would mutter, “Shush,” to me and my little brother as he intently watched what I later understood to be a nation at war, not only with another country on the other side of the world, but also between a generation of its people. Thanks though to my dad’s persistent and sometimes potent “shushing,” I somehow managed to pay enough attention to have forever etched into my memory some of the most remarkable journalism of my time.
It was in that family room in a little nowhere town in south Louisiana that I watched, without mature comprehension, the nation that I loved and sang songs about and pledged my allegiance to forever change. It was as though housed symbolically within that wooded-television case there hung a nation’s cocoon; and that on each day right as the smells of evening dinner were exciting the senses, you could witness the ever-so-gradual and painful transition within that was taking place. It took me many years and mistakes in the voting booth to understand what had transpired during those evenings of peripheral entertainment and even more time to fully understand how important it is for me to not just vote but to consciously vote.
More recently and for a little over six years, I worked as a freelance court reporter, and spent a good majority of my time amongst everyday people involved in some sort of litigation. My job often was to record verbatim, through a process called a deposition, those questions and answers that would provide details of these people’s lives and other particulars as it would relate to their case. Many days I would sit invisibly for hours taking down sworn testimony from people involved in this process. What I tell people now when they ask me about that work is that what astonished me most during the course of a day’s work was how rarely I could tell which of these people had been lying.
When there are two sides or more of a story, such as there always is when people are unable to settle a dispute without resorting to the expense and stress of engaging the services of a lawyer, at some level and about some things someone has to be lying. I could never quite put my finger on it, but somewhere deep down the realization that someone would solemnly swear to tell the truth and then not do so was disheartening to me. It was not the Peyton-Place-like stories that I pounded feverishly into my machine or the impressive and sometimes not-so-impressive performances of those empassioned lawyers engaged in the craft of their trade that captured my attention. What did arouse my interest and does to this day was the fact that people, often very likeable, could, under oath and for reasons only they knew, knowingly tell lies and remain so calm and unaffected.
The reason that I mention both of those two distinct time periods of my life is because of very significant lessons that I learned during both of them. Turning on the evening news today, sadly, we still see images similar to those that I saw in the family room of my childhood. This country I still love and sing about and pledge my allegiance to is at war yet again, and we as a people are divided still. And it seems to me that among those divided, each with opposing sides of their story to tell, someone is not telling the truth. I still look at their calm or not-so-calm accusations and listen to their deliberate and often convincing versions, and still I can’t distinguish who is telling the truth.
As a court reporter, it was my job to remain unbiased and silent during the process; but as an active, registered voter, my duty is to become informed, carefully choose sides, and if necessary make a little noise. This is my noise.
