Protecting The Innocent From The Real

'You want the truth?! You can't handle the truth!' Perhaps you remember that line from the movie A Few Good Men, in which Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson starred. It pretty much sums up how many of us come to feel relative to our need to protect those we happen to see as being innocent. Some of the harsher realities going on in this-world need to be shielded from our eyes. Governments do it to their citizens. Parents do it to their children. And Freud reminded us all that we are at least potentially capable of hiding the truth from our own conscious awareness.

Maybe you have heard of what Freud called 'repression.' It was suggested by Freud that we find a way to repress harsh truths because we are psychologically incapable of dealing with the consequences of those truths. We can't make a place for it in our current conceptions of the world we live in, so we deny its existence--i.e., it becomes buried in a psychological sense, our unconsciousness some new inhabitants.

Hiding from the truth--or just hiding the truth--to me seems to confess some belief in human frailty. It is as if we are confessing that the psyche is a fragile little child that we need to protect and shelter from 'what is' for fear that exposure to 'what is' will undermine the psyche. All of which makes me wonder if the psyche is, in someway, the locus of fantasy and illusion--of how we wish things were, of how we wish things could be, of how we would prefer to see the world as being.

Are we psychologically as fragile as our apparent need to protect oursleves from 'what is' would seem to suggest? Or might we not admire our inherent strength and psychological resilience for what it is? What if we don't give each other enough credit--as governments to citizens and as parents to children (as well as ourselves psychologically)? What if the notion that we can't handle the truth is a false one--a notion that presupposes weakness and fragility? What if we struggle with Reality because we have not yet admitted to each other, as well as to our self, what has happened, what is happening now, and what is in the works for happening tomorrow and the day after?

What if we can handle the truth but never know that we can because we don't give each other the chance? What if our children are forced to rebel from us because we are not honest with them? What if the citizenry revolts and rebels in the name of Revolution because there is a thirst for the Truth that cannot be quenched as long as Big Brother is being overly protective? What if we are made for the Truth and the Truth is made for us?