Sunday, March 21, 2010

Reflections inspired by "The Lacuna"

Some of you may remember that "The Lacuna" by Barbara Kingsolver featured in my Teaser Tuesday last tuesday. Well on the bus home today I finished reading it. It made me reflect on a number of issues.

Firstly - how unfair the world and the society is sometimes. The end of the book is set in post world war 2 America where the anti-communism view was taking off. It really frustrates me how biasist and cruel people can be and how bad the system can get. I really hate injustice. And how people just twist words - especially the media - just get to the answer they want. It must have been a frightening time to live in.

And following on from this - the media. This book illustrates how bad the media can be in terms of portraying the truth. Here is a quote I liked

" They had no wish to tell what a man has done with his life. That would require honest witness. THe simpler thing is to state what he has been called".


Grrr.

The problem is - how can you know what is true if you havn't experienced it first hand. If you don't rely on the media you could try relying on what aquaintances to tell you - and there problem with that is that either you get very limited information (if you just go by what they have experienced) or the information is even more inaccurate because of the whole chinese whisper affect.

Or you could just rely on nothing at all which is even worse - because I think knowing about the world is important and lack of knowledge breeds ignoranace and prejudice of other people and their situations.

I think sometimes i take what I read too much at face value

How much do you trust what you read/hear? How do you deal with this dilema?

1 comment:

DB said...

I try not to read celeb mags & that sort of trash where there is no real law about how credible any of their facts need to be.
I watch the news a cpl times a day because I agree, it's important to know what's going on in the world, if only to reflect upon how lucky we are to live in a fairly carefree time/country/etc.
But when it's stories that slander people I try to keep an open mind & hear it from the horse's mouth before I make any decisions.
I never read the papers, I was interviewed once about my thoughts on an upcoming election for the Telegraph. When I saw it in print they had taken like a 1/4 of what I said & muddled it all around to reflect whatever opinion they were trying to convey. It was taken totally out of context & insulted people that I had actually spoken highly of. I learnt first hand from that that the news stories we read & hear could still be so far from the truth even when labelled a direct quote!