My conspiracy
It's what they tell you every time - that it's different, that the polic really are following them, that the government really did set them up. I get them every single week, and you can't hope to ever explain to them that the police aren't there, and that the government couldn't really give a damn.
Up and then down, and the back up again. To the right, slowly, and then back to the left again, tracing a slight, airborne pattern that you can barely see, and can never hope to comprehend.
It is spring again, finally, and although there may be snow a few more times, it is certainly every bit of spring. You can see it nowhere more clearly than in the tone of the sunlight: lying on a bed with the sun crossing you in bars, you can watch a fleck of dust — so small it can truly be called a mote — make its meandering, stumbling route from nowhere to nowhere else.
Searching for purpose
It’s comforting, somehow, to imagine that there’s a great purpose in that fleck, to think that it is part of a bigger whole, of some sort of overarching and complicated pattern, out of which spins something close to divine order.
But boy it’s hard to do that. Far easier to accept what is obvious: that the storm windows still leak air currents, that the furnace has clicked on, or that the sun has created its own tiny atmospherics inside the confines of your room.
The problem is that one has majesty and purpose, and the other has only the sheer and placid blindness of chance.
Maybe that’s why no one ever wants to believe they are simply the victims of bad luck, and why it is they have to feel that they are the victims of great plans and conspiracies.
Regular event
It is practically a weekly occurrence in the media: someone will call on the phone, or come to the front desk, to outline how it is that they believe that the government or the courts has built a great conspiracy against them. The proof is often discrete at best: the tone of people’s voices, the ease with which a complaint is dismissed. Sometimes, people go to great lengths to document their mistreatment — sometimes, there are pages of notes, the dates and times for telephone calls, and careful notations about the callers’ tone and exasperation.
And the fact is that sometimes all of it is true; sometimes, governments do conspire, often by piling cover over cover over cover, building a nacre of guile that’s as hard and smooth and self-protective as a pearl. But that is the most rare of exceptions.
Most times, though, it’s nothing of the kind. People believe that slights are all the more significant because they are the people the slights have happened to — what they don’t realize is that administrations are big, sloppy machines that hand out as many slights as they do solutions. And most times, conspiracies are nothing more than the bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then dealing with a government that has the means and the will to hide its faults by simply doing nothing at all.
The problem is that governments are not so carefully drawn, so tightly controlled, that it can even build and manage one great conspiracy, let alone many at the same time.
That’s the sad and honest truth — but it’s also a truth that many people just can’t bring themselves to believe. No one wants to believe they are the victims of what one writer once called a confederacy of dunces — somehow, just falling into that sort of hole makes you seem in some way to blame.
Governments do roll right over people and trample their rights — but they do that far more often by accident and sins of omission, and far less by malice and commission.
But that’s not a message that many people are willing to hear.
Why? Because no one wants to believe that their lives could be as inconsequential as an errant mote of dust.
----
Up and then down, and the back up again. To the right, slowly, and then back to the left again, tracing a slight, airborne pattern that you can barely see, and can never hope to comprehend.
It is spring again, finally, and although there may be snow a few more times, it is certainly every bit of spring. You can see it nowhere more clearly than in the tone of the sunlight: lying on a bed with the sun crossing you in bars, you can watch a fleck of dust — so small it can truly be called a mote — make its meandering, stumbling route from nowhere to nowhere else.
Searching for purpose
It’s comforting, somehow, to imagine that there’s a great purpose in that fleck, to think that it is part of a bigger whole, of some sort of overarching and complicated pattern, out of which spins something close to divine order.
But boy it’s hard to do that. Far easier to accept what is obvious: that the storm windows still leak air currents, that the furnace has clicked on, or that the sun has created its own tiny atmospherics inside the confines of your room.
The problem is that one has majesty and purpose, and the other has only the sheer and placid blindness of chance.
Maybe that’s why no one ever wants to believe they are simply the victims of bad luck, and why it is they have to feel that they are the victims of great plans and conspiracies.
Regular event
It is practically a weekly occurrence in the media: someone will call on the phone, or come to the front desk, to outline how it is that they believe that the government or the courts has built a great conspiracy against them. The proof is often discrete at best: the tone of people’s voices, the ease with which a complaint is dismissed. Sometimes, people go to great lengths to document their mistreatment — sometimes, there are pages of notes, the dates and times for telephone calls, and careful notations about the callers’ tone and exasperation.
And the fact is that sometimes all of it is true; sometimes, governments do conspire, often by piling cover over cover over cover, building a nacre of guile that’s as hard and smooth and self-protective as a pearl. But that is the most rare of exceptions.
Most times, though, it’s nothing of the kind. People believe that slights are all the more significant because they are the people the slights have happened to — what they don’t realize is that administrations are big, sloppy machines that hand out as many slights as they do solutions. And most times, conspiracies are nothing more than the bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then dealing with a government that has the means and the will to hide its faults by simply doing nothing at all.
The problem is that governments are not so carefully drawn, so tightly controlled, that it can even build and manage one great conspiracy, let alone many at the same time.
That’s the sad and honest truth — but it’s also a truth that many people just can’t bring themselves to believe. No one wants to believe they are the victims of what one writer once called a confederacy of dunces — somehow, just falling into that sort of hole makes you seem in some way to blame.
Governments do roll right over people and trample their rights — but they do that far more often by accident and sins of omission, and far less by malice and commission.
But that’s not a message that many people are willing to hear.
Why? Because no one wants to believe that their lives could be as inconsequential as an errant mote of dust.
----
posted by Russell Wangersky at 3:38 AM
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