Trust, suspicion and finding men on the moon
The first moon landing, 45
years ago last Sunday, must have been a very big deal,
because we actually found out about it.
Or, at least, my brother Fred
did.
A lot of minor news slipped
past us when we were Amish, since we didn’t have a TV
or radio, and we bought a newspaper only sporadically.
We five children shared a big
bedroom upstairs in that old farmhouse in 1969, and
that night Fred knelt by the tall, narrow window and
gazed at the moon in the sky above the buggy shed.
Fred always gave you the
feeling that he was in on something mysterious and
astonishing. If you were really lucky, and really nice
to him, he just might let you in on the secret.
“Yes,” he said. “I think I
see something.”
We rushed to the window, my
8-year-old sister Rebecca and I, a year younger.
Fred was 11. He knew
everything. He said, “People landed on the moon today.
I think ... yes, I’m pretty sure I see little black
dots moving around on the moon.”
Really?
We leaned in and looked hard
at that big white moon. We squinted and focused and
pretty soon we exclaimed that ... Yes! There they
were! We could see them too!
To this day, I don’t know if
he had fooled himself as thoroughly as he fooled us.
Much later, disillusioned, we learned to be suspicious
of anything Fred told us, after he had convinced me
that the pig pellets in the feed room were good to
snack on, Rebecca that he and she were actually twins,
and my little sister Margaret that pennies smelled
like pig manure.
It is comforting that
everyone who knows Fred tells similar stories of
believing the most improbable things, simply because
he said it in such a way that you felt stupid and
unkind if you didn’t believe him.
He once worked on a dairy
farm and pocketed a diseased tooth that a veterinarian
pulled from a cow. Providentially, he had a wisdom
tooth pulled soon after.
The owner’s wife offered her
sympathies when he returned to work after his dentist
visit. Fred said, all seriously, “Would you like to
see the tooth they pulled?” and pulled out the cow
tooth, a vicious-looking specimen with curved roots 2
inches long.
He convinced the woman it had
actually come from his mouth. He still has that
mysterious magic that makes you want to believe
everything he says.
I’ve found that the world is
full of people like Fred. Not as charming, perhaps,
but just as able to make you feel silly if you don’t
believe them.
To be informed on current
issues to any degree is to be almost forced to form an
opinion, so while I would like to walk the narrow path
of reason and truth, I often find myself in one ditch
or another — overly trusting and gullible, or
unnecessarily skeptical and suspicious.
Health, medicine, science,
finances, politics, parenting, religion and many more
examples — all have spokespeople who seem determined
to persuade the rest of us to alter our lives to their
theories. For every multi-degreed expert presenting
his case as truth so obvious and verified you couldn’t
possibly believe otherwise, there’s a counter-voice
urging suspicion of experts with hidden agendas and
guesses presented smoothly as fact.
Strangely, while the Amish
are sometimes a bit too eager to believe the claims of
alternative medicine and similar fields, many of them
were skeptical about the moon landings. I lived with
an elderly Amish bishop and his wife after high
school, and Noah with his deep preaching voice would
hold forth on the subject. “They say they put ‘de
mensha’ on the moon,” he’d bellow, “but it was all
made up.”
Then he’d talk confidently
about how they staged the scene to make the moonscape
look real and took the pictures, even though he had
never used a camera in his life.
Perhaps it’s because the
Amish have been fighting the cultural current for
centuries that I learned in that context to be
suspicious of otherwise well-respected experts in
science and government.
Or maybe it’s my age, having
seen experts proved wrong.
Bankers in the 1970s urged
Midwestern farmers to take out enormous loans and buy
equally enormous equipment. This was how modern
farming was done, they said. Tragically, many of these farmers
crashed and burned financially in the early ’80s.
When my friends and I were
having babies, our doctors always told us that no,
there was no way that teething caused fevers.
But we were the ones up at
night with fussy, feverish babies who recovered
magically when their upper incisors popped through,
plus we had a lot more babies than any of our doctors
did. So we took their expert advice with a grain of
salt and gave the counsel of experienced moms equal
weight.
We learned about the four
food groups in home ec in high school, and later the
side of every cereal box told us that low-fat food was
the way to be healthy, so we nibbled on pretzels for
years, feeling tired and hungry, and then lost weight
and felt healthier when we switched to steak and
butter and veggies.
As a mom, minister’s wife and
writer, I often think about influence and what it
takes to change someone’s mind. What makes us form a
belief? What solidifies it? What makes us change it?
For many people, including
myself, it isn’t facts and logic that make the
difference. Experience and emotion and relationships
are the stronger influences. You don’t win the
argument by making the other side look stupid.
I “saw” the astronauts on the
moon because I wanted so badly to be as cool as my
brother. Later, the humiliation of being fooled
multiple times outweighed the satisfaction of being in
on his schemes.
Today, I am slow to believe
any of Fred’s stories. I squint at him just as I
squinted at the moon years ago, but now with careful
analysis — true or not true? Hmmm.
This pains him deeply, he
says, playing on my compassion with large, sad eyes.
It worked when I was 7 but fails to affect me now.
If emotions and experience
make the difference, then, most of the time, nothing I
say will change anyone’s mind, so I seldom engage in
debate.
Plus, I have a burdensome
ability to understand all sides of an issue and why
people believe as they do.
Most things are not worth
arguing about, and in 10 years many of the most
outspoken among us will look really silly, time having
proven them wrong. If you keep your opinions to
yourself, you can quietly change your views as time
goes on without having to endure the pain of publicly
backtracking.
My faith is important to me
and, as a believer, I’ve been accused of ignoring the
facts. I understand this viewpoint. Yet, the deep-down
intangibles are even more real and true to me —
conscience, forgiveness, hope. How do you debate such
concepts?
My influence depends largely
on how I make people feel, a discouraging concept for
noisy debaters but comforting to people like me, who
hate arguments but would love to turn everyone down
the path of kindness and responsibility, simplicity
and faith.
I will no doubt believe the
wrong people for the wrong reasons at times, and then
wise up and change my mind, as long as I live. And so
will everyone around me.
What I want to remember is
that we are all a lot like that little 7-year-old girl
looking at the moon: persuaded more by emotions than
facts, more by empathy than condescension, and more by
experience than information.
Others will be influenced
more by who we are than by anything wise and logical
we might say.
I remember the moon landing like it was yesterday! We went to a friend's house who had just gotten a color TV. That in itself was pretty amazing but the whole idea of men on the moon was surreal to this then 9 year old.
ReplyDeleteOur beloved pediatrician actually told me that babies get fevers when they are teething. He said that in med school they told him it could not happen. He was the father of six and said it had been so with all of his children.
Beautiful, grace-filled thoughts. Thank you for writing and sharing.
ReplyDeleteWhen I'm boldly told, "There is no scientific proof for that.", I claim that experience holds more weight to me than something in a petri dish in a lab! Louise
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