When truth lies
It's green, it looks good, it tastes good to livestock, and it has lots of carbohydrates and proteins. That's the truth, nothing but the truth. But it's not the whole truth.
O. lambertii Pursh. Crazyweed. Non-standard name: locoweed, a perennial herbaceous legume common on western rangelands. Once livestock eat it, they seek out the plants and poison themselves on the toxic but tasty plant. Horses never recover once they are poisoned.
It's sad to see a horse with that fierce gleam in the eye setting aside all other options, pursuing the taste, smell and look of only one thing to consume. Once the entire mind and body is so obsessed, there is no turning back.
Just like horses seeking out this intoxicating plant, sometimes we humans pursue part of the truth similarly recklessly.
I was in a conversation with a Foreign Languages Department colleague at XiHua University in Sichuan Province of China a few years ago. It was National Day in China, with fireworks celebrating the day the Communist Party established the New China, "…like your July fourth celebration," she said. She was honest and insightful, yet spared no mercy in her criticism of Chairman Mao.
She remembered almost 50 years ago, when she competed successfully with her cadre of "Red Guard" revolutionaries for the right to travel to Beijing to represent them at a great rally where Mao would address the crowd of tens of thousands from all over China.
She explained how tears flowed from her eyes at the moment Chairman Mao appeared at the dais. I asked her if she remembered anything he said. She only remembered the obsession, the passion of hundreds of thousands of young people brandishing small red Chinese flags and Chairman Mao's Little Red Book, screaming its slogans with great emotion.
Everyone endorsed his truth: a mission to defeat the enemies of China and rid the entire nation of counter-revolutionaries. This included people with any cultural connection to the West, especially America and Great Britain. Several times she was apologetic for being swept into this terrible wave of hysteria in China.
A few months later, talking with a Chinese legal scholar, I started to understand her regret at being part of that day, cheering Chairman Mao. Perhaps she felt partly responsible for the consequences of Mao's disastrous leadership.
Once his power was secure, Mao had decided that China's steel production had to rival Great Britain's at all costs. Following Mao's directive, entire villages gladly gave up cast-iron cooking pots and steel farm tools. The iron was taken as scrap to the village steel smelter for making weapons to defend China from the great threat overseas.
Tools for survival were given up in order to "defend the motherland." Without rice and food crops, people all over China starved to death. He volunteered his estimate of deaths in the four years of their rampage in the early 60s: 80 million people, many from starvation and many from violence.
Here on Greenwood Farm's Back 40, hundreds of varieties of species I didn't plant are competing with my dormant seeding from last November. I've bought a copy of Weeds of the West, consulted the NRCS and MSU Extension. I'm serious about avoiding deceptive truth, especially the worst kind: locoweed.
So far, I haven't found any. I need as much help managing my farm as all of us need in dissecting the half-truths bombarding us from any particular media paranoia peddler.
Our media is saturated with information biased toward narrow viewpoints. The larger picture is ignored, especially common ground outside the loud little boxes. The split TV screen has become the mantra; choose your side. Two proponents raise their voices in intractable argument over opposite assertions, both true. Neither can acknowledge any truth outside what they're shouting. It passes for political debate. Many of us are hooked.
If all we consider when making political decisions are the talking heads, these political "strategists" whose job it is to advance a particular agenda, we risk becoming caught up in hysteria, driven out of our minds like horses poisoned by locoweed and youthful revolutionaries poisoned by a demagogue.
And that's the truth, nothing but the truth. But it's not the whole truth.
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