The Day truth died

How: Part 1

You would be amazed at what can feel normal with time; to what depths a person can descend without even noticing– just as long as the rate of change is sufficiently slow.

If the earth’s rotation were such that the transition from day to night took 40 years, one wonders if anyone born in the day would notice anything was different until the last rays of light disappeared and darkness was complete. I doubt they would.

Something like that is what happened to me between the age of 7 and 12 years old. In 60 long months, my world turned upside down and no one seemed to notice.

Truth died first, followed close behind by its eternal companions, goodness and beauty.

It was the summer of 1996. I was 7 years old, living a good life in Terre Haute, Indiana. My mom had been suffering from an undiagnosed illness, and I didn’t understand why friends from school could never come over (I was too young to imagine parents weren’t eager to send their kids where we lived). Sure, life with 3 older siblings had its ups and downs. But overall, I had it good. Lots of love, family, stability, predictability, food on the table, and clothes to wear– occasionally even new ones! No one realized it at the time, but the ground was beginning to tilt, creating a gentle incline down which we would slide to unforeseen depths.

At the time my mom was regularly receiving what she thought were divine messages and that summer, for the first time, the message was one that would significantly impact our lives. My mom, who had divorced my dad before I was born, was told to move from Indiana to Arkansas where she would meet a new husband named Ken.

The acceptance of these messages as unquestionably true was the pernicious seed that was to bear much disastrous fruit. Truth was in jeopardy.

We packed up our belongings and, along with my aunt Katrina, hit the road heading for Arkansas– which my 7-year-old mind pictured to be one giant desert with little desert towns spread across it. We made it to Arkansas and to my surprise we found grass and trees! What we didn’t ever find was Ken… or a place to live.

My sister (left), me (middle) and one of my brothers (right) on the road in 1996.

After a few weeks living on the road we headed south again, this time towards Texas where my grandparents lived. Without any protest, without any resistance, without making a sound, truth died an Orwellian death, paving the way for doublethink. The infallible source of my mom’s messages had made two truth claims (our home in Arkansas and Ken). Both turned out to be false, and yet the source remained unassailable.

When that happens, truth is functionally dead.

With the guardrails of truth removed, there was little that remained to stop our slippery slide down the gentle slope into the cave. And slide we did. First into the cave, then down, down, down, until we reached a place where the light was not only gone, but forgotten.

Up Next: Life in the Cave