Real World Facts And Graveyard Plaques

Marc Legare is a philosopher and motorcycle adventurist.

He has travelled extensively, worked and lived in Australia, US, and across Canada.

He has a varied working career including: Firefighter, Lawyer, Navy, Motorcycle Importer, plus others. He chose to return to southern Saskatchewan because of his family’s deep roots here.

As a columnist, Legare’s columns will offer food for thought.

There is a long forgotten saying that goes like this, “believe none of what you hear and half of what you see.” That has a great deal of wisdom in it. It is the “half of what you see” part of those venerable words that is troubling today.

As strange as this sounds to our electronically bombarded minds, there are ways of gaining information beyond an internet search. One example of this came during a recent walk through a Southern Saskatchewan graveyard. There is a brass plaque in a local cemetery that stands as an icon of higher education and offers a truth beyond our computer. On that plaque are a list of names, many of them young, of those who died in 1918 and 1919. The list is tragically long. We all know why the list is lengthy for those years; The Spanish Flu.

The next fact seeking sojourn was a stop by the local coffee shop to ask a simple question. How many people have been buried in that cemetery in the past 15 months due to our modern pandemic? The answer was none. By itself, the brass remembrance represents a sad list of lost futures, sickness, and death. But, if you add the two together, that plaque becomes a beacon of truth. Connecting the dots in that example is left to the individual. What is more important is to highlight the educational value of what that real world, tangible, memorial offers. The lesson for all is that truths are available to us right outside our front doors.

There is a simple experiment we can all do. Let us take a day out of our busy lives and not gain any knowledge whatsoever from electronic sources. Instead, walk through the day and observe people, places, and things with only our God given faculty, our eyes.

Would it surprise us if we discovered what we see and what the electronic world is telling us are not the same? Do we have the courage to try such an experiment? It may be scary because if we discover there is a difference, we are left with the frightful obligation to decide which one is more true, our computers or our eyes. In doing so, we must either become more faithful to electronic knowledge or begin to re-establish trust in our own eyesight. Many of us are not seeing things that are directly in front of us. We increasingly rely on the internet or other electronic sources to tell us what is true. We are losing sight of our own sight.

The wise saying of, “believe none of what you hear and half of what you see,” makes a presumption that was not necessary to explain to past “computerless” people. For us, however, we need to remind ourselves to look and see real life things around us, not just our virtual world. There is a war going on for our minds. Turning off electronics and opening our eyes to what is clearly visible in front of us is more necessary now than ever. Our ability to see is a powerful weapon against false news and exaggerated claims. Our vision is an exceptional truth filter. Who knows, maybe we can get back to basics and start believing “half of what we see.” In order to get to that healthy well-balanced halfway point, however, we must first be using our eyes to begin with.

As usual, a poet sums things up well. Thoreau wrote, “It is not what you look at that matters, it is what you see.”

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.