I lost my voice. Not in the customarily Laryngitis sort of way
where a virus invades my vocal cords.
Nor by singing favorite tunes in a higher than usual pitch. Oddly enough, repetitive whispering puts as
much strain on vocal chords as screaming does; but all of that is purely
physical apparatus of voice. I’m talking about the voice of opinion had been
silenced; and I was clueless to its cause.
Perhaps clueless is not entirely accurate. If
I could muster up some genuine honesty in my reflection, I might admit I saw
resignation coming from years ahead. I just surmised that sooner or later I’d
become weary with protesting the outrageous; then inevitably it’d arrive
without a lot of fanfare. I recognized it was just a question of time before the
fruitlessness of shaking my fist at the Gods for what appeared as unrelenting
challenge to my happiness would become the norm; no one was listening. I could puzzle out the merits of
enlightenment and wisdom as hard fought products wrestled into possession by formal
education. Contrasted to a more subtle raw experience where complaining was a
poor substitute for not trying. As each
door of the unknown was thrust opened I only found more darkness; it was up to
me to screw up the courage to go into it without permission or assurance that
it was safe.
I had learned early on, in college philosophy,
that all knowledge contained kernels of doubt; strip away the lazily accepted
handout assumptions then sooner or later what remained was a pool of questions that
snared wandering minds as sure as the gravity of the largest black hole; when
experience conflicted with craftily cultivated expectations there’d sure as
shooting be dissonance.
What mattered became a paradox; then an oxymoron,
where a point of view defied vocabulary.
A place where words served the symbols of abstract concepts, those being
mere propositions formed by conjecture; both true and false. Words contained worlds of their own
interpretation as they were coupled with other like-kind words, resulting in a
train yard coupling defying the imagination as to designed intent or purpose;
where any position could be interpreted to mean the opposite: politicians had been playing that game for
years, but then no one took them seriously at their word anyway, so it was
forgiven. The trouble arrived when the
rank and file of citizenry picked up the practice so then no one could discern
what to believe; the worst of it all was, who could be trusted? It ultimately dissolved
into the opinion of ‘it depends,’ and to be honest, trust always was a
subjective exercise anyway. But we were lured for so long into the false belief
that ours was a shared value system with agreed upon boundaries. Only in the dire-straights of emergency was
it noticeable that the thundering cacophony of the crown was crying the same lament:
Who’s in charge here anyway?
Soon
enough, it became so damn painfully obvious. It was never a singular case of protest
about personal situation, but rather realizing discomfort wasn’t anything that
made me special.
After
that, what was there to say beyond apologizing for misconception?
My
mistake.
