Today’s guest blog is by Steve Grooms
America was in the seventh year of its war with North Vietnam in the fall of 1971. That fall I was a graduate student in the University of Minnesota. I wasn’t sure what degree I was seeking or what I’d do with it, once I’d graduated. I mainly had to maintain official student status so I wouldn’t be drafted to join the war.
I had hated this war since its start. Every night I shook with fury as various national leaders went on television to lie about the “progress” of the war. Every year, more and more people died—young and old, Vietnamese and American, civilians and soldiers. Every year, the official logic for the war looked more insane.
I finally decided that my hatred of the war might provide a plan for my life. The American public was not getting the straight story about Vietnam. Maybe I could become the sort of pioneering journalist who would show all my docile countrymen how wrong the war was. Even better, perhaps I could become a columnist with a courageous voice who would write op/ed essays showing my readers how stupid they were to believe the lies the U.S. government was feeding them about the war.
And so I decided to switch my major from American studies to journalism. I had a lot to catch up on, for I had never yet taken a journalism course. Unfortunately, I had a late registration date, so all desirable courses in writing and editing were filled before I could sign up for classes. In fact, the only promising course still open was “Public Opinion and Propaganda.” At least that course would relate to my intention to use journalism to open the public’s eyes to the madness of the war.
Things didn’t go as planned. That class shocked and confused me in a way no other event in my long educational history had done.
The first shock was learning how silly I had been to think I could educate people by telling them the truth. The first section of the course showed how diligently people protect their pet beliefs from anything that challenges those beliefs. One study we read showed that people have at least eleven different strategies for denying information or views that they don’t want to hear. Eleven! Although to tell the truth, any single one of those mental tricks will usually work to keep unwelcome facts or views at a distance.
For example, if new facts threaten the values people already hold, people have no trouble ignoring the new facts. Or they might encounter information they don’t like and simply forget it. Or they might misremember things so badly that they think that the new facts actually support their preferred view of things. Or they might summarily dismiss unwelcome views because they came from a suspect source. And so it goes.
The lesson was hammered home over and over: People are going to believe whatever they choose to believe.
Before I had been in the course for a week I could see that the world needed another angry young man with a typewriter about as much as it needed more communicable diseases. I wasn’t going to win the hearts and minds of fellow Americans with all the predictable liberal cant I planned to publish. People would never thank me for telling them my version of the truth. ”Oh, so this war is actually a tragic and murderous mistake? Gee, I wish I’d heard earlier, but thanks, Steve, for finally straightening me out!”
My first response to my new sense of public opinion and propaganda was a practical one. I dropped the silly plan to become a crusading writer. My graduate school major went from “journalism” back to “damned if I know!”
And yet the most significant impact of the course on me had less to do with an occupation and more with character. My course taught me that people were amazingly wily and energetic when their pet beliefs were threatened. But I was a “people” too! I had a belief structure, too, that I was surely defending with all the techniques I’d been studying. Like everyone else on earth, I was a shyster and a con man who could lie and forget and spin and misremember things so I wouldn’t experience the discomfort of doubting my own preferred version of truth.
Since 1971 I have tried to live with the uneasy fact that much of what I believe in—including things I passionately believe in—is probably not true. Of course, one can know that without knowing which core values and facts are bogus. Now I live with a sort of Truth Policeman in my head who knows every sly trick I use to protect my preferred way of seeing things. He cuts me no slack, that dirty copper! He catches me when I resort to mental tricks to preserve my comfort zone of faith.
And yet I have come here to praise him, not bury him with a lot of whining. It is healthy to be asked—or forced to—defend one’s pet beliefs. When I sense myself wanting to believe in something, I automatically become skeptical. The more I want to believe something, the more likely I am to be lying to myself. Oy weh and ish da! This kind of self-doubt can mess up your mind.
Ultimately, I’m not sure this kind of self-awareness can make a person better at seeing the truth. It is surely more realistic to hope that wisdom and self-awareness about these issues can makes us a bit more humble about all those things we think we know about the world.
Have you ever encountered a gifted teacher, special course or singular event that shook up your personal values and caused you to re-think pet beliefs?
Trail Baboon 
Almost exactly this: but not in a formal ed setting.
Taking brief typing route, Steve. But through reading I did, as a spinoff in a Public Media course in Murphy Hall (I was a j minor), I learned compete distrust in my belief system.
Ever notice I take no real political stands on here? That’s why. No faith in mine, or yours, or anyone’s for that matter. But it’s mine that I’m ‘sponsible for; which is scary part.
Oh, good morning friends. ‘cept I been up for hours.
PS had weird dream ‘spierience, not the dream, the ‘sperience of it. Pain runs a weird kingdom.
LikeLike
Thanks, Clyde. After I’d written this I thought, “People don’t really change their thinking based on a course or great teacher. This guest blog is going to crash and burn because people just don’t do things like that.” And then I thought: “But if anyone can relate to this, it will be Clyde!”
Of course, your attitude of taking responsibility for your own positions makes sense. But we have to do a delicate dance: we need to be humble about our own convictions and yet committed enough to them to act where that is appropriate.
I took my course in Murphy Hall too, and at about the same time. Maybe we sat side by side.
LikeLike
Steve – I agree that this is a fascinating topic. I remember reading an article several years back (when I was wondering why anybody could support that current administration as I saw them as morally bankrupt) talking about this. It hinted that people were almost hard-wired to not change their belief system. Of course, it didn’t explain how one person in a family goes in one direction while another goes in a completely opposite direction (i.e. my middle sister and I).
The hardest part about your question is that, almost according to the definition of the issues, most people don’t question their pet beliefs!
LikeLike
I knew some baboon would be sharp enough to spot the central conflict in my blog, which says people don’t change convictions and then is all about how I one time did! You nailed it.
What we have is a world in which most of us move along in our thinking like a glacier, never changing much in speed or direction. And yet the amazing thing can happen, when suddenly the stars align in such a way that we do have one of those great epiphanies.
LikeLike
Different courses.My course was dreadfully taught. Made me read across the topic in other fields. Have spent my lifetime catching myself doing the dance. Huck Finn (book, not character)–it’s the lies we tell ourselves that are the dangerous ones. To which I add, and most of the time we don’t catch the lie.
Nuff light to bike.
LikeLike
Number One. When I was in high school, I was seriously into the foreign exchange student program; my family hosted a student my junior year and I was the President of the AFS for 3 years. In fact, due to my involvement and “cheerleading” of the group, the year that I was going to apply, there were record numbers of applicants. The process was a breeze for me. Because of my involvement, I knew all the adult interviewers well and was very comfortable with everyone. They chose two other girls! Then one of the girls got turned down at the next step (New York panel) and the other girl only got passed on to the summer program (vs. the whole year). My mother told me several months later that the interviewers thought I was the best candidate, but they were afraid to pick me because they thought it would look like favoritism. This stung for years and made me regret that there might be a lot more to the old adage “it’s who you know” than I like. And not always in a good way, either!
LikeLike
Ouch. So this led to your travel career? Making up for a lost opportunity?
LikeLike
No – I think I’ve had the travel bug my whole life. And, in the way that things always seem to eventually work out in my life, because I didn’t go anywhere my senior year, I ended up with a nice trip after I graduated… two and a half months living with a family in Mexico. The summer before, a Mexican family had contacted the school district looking for a place for their two teen-age daughters for a couple of months – to get a taste of the U.S. and practice their English. School contacted my family and Mari and Tashi stayed with us for two months. Then the next summer I went and stayed with them!
LikeLike
Rise and Shine Baboons!
OT–Don’t know if you have ventured outside today, but it is gorgeous out there! I plan to revel in it now that I am on my feet and past punctuation procedures. I think I actually experienced Punctuation Camp yesterday. In my nearly-high, drowsy condition I started to giggle because I was thinking about Punctuation Camp, then (tried to) joke around, telling the GI-guy I wanted a Napolean Dynamite band aid (yes there are such things) where he removed a polyp. He had to tell me to stop because he lost the site due to my giggling. See now Baboons? This is what you do to people.
Meanwhile, back to topic. My confirmation/catechism teacher was our local college Physics Professor named Sheldon Cramm. Let me tell you, he taught church history and religion with a different and welcome slant. I loved this guy and what he taught. He allowed me to view religion through a clear lens. He said things like the following:
“The church is a human institution with a divine purpose, and the humans often get it wrong. You just put with that.”
“People will tell you that there is a conflict between the Creation Story and Science. Don’t believe it. Science will tell you how, the Bible will tell you why and is a history of humanity. Don’t worry about it.”
He sorta made religion work for me–through a physics lens I guess.
LikeLike
🙂
LikeLike
Congratulations, Jacque, for the benign colonial experience. When I had mine and tried to joke with the doc with the machine, she sized me up as trouble and turned up the knock-out gas valve.
Your confirmation teacher sounds remarkably cool!
LikeLike
I wish I could say I had a teacher who changed my life, but the sad truth is that my parochial grade and high school teachers didn’t pay much attention to me–I was a quiet kid who made good grades, so they assumed everything was okay. I did have fantastic professors in college who praised and encouraged me; Jonis Agee at St. Kates, in particular, did a lot to help us think of ourselves as writers (and, incidentally, teach us how to critique and to read our work in public). However, any change in my personal beliefs has always been a slow accumulation of reading and thinking about issues until my behavior and/or professed beliefs are ready for change. Actually, the people I have to thank for the changes in my life have all been authors, and no one I’ve met face-to-face.
LikeLike
Thoughtful post, CG.
I wish my introductory comments had made more of the possibility for a charismatic figure, like Jonis Agee, to alter the way we see things. I believe that is a more common way for this to happen than the process I and Clyde experienced.
In earlier times the charismatic figure who could work such a transformative change in thinking would have been someone in the church. My mother’s mother was raised a Methodist. She and many others in her church adored a young minister who somehow fell out of favor with his heirarchy. He was chucked out but somehow ended up gaining a Congregational Church ministry. My grandmother and about half the Methodist church in her town changed churches at that moment.
My own move from conservative Republican politics to my current pinko thinking had a lot to do with college profs who modeled a more socially aware and compassionate politics than what I’d grown up with. Common experience, I think.
LikeLike
At Pudue, where I went to school in the late 60s, most of the profs were more or less on the conservative side and discouraged “pinko” thinking. There was a very small collection of profs that were more progressive. I was told that my anti-war activities could cause me to get bad recomendations from the Pudue staff when applying for jobs and I know of one case where this did happen.
LikeLike
Good morning to all,
I think it is very hard to change any ones mind about anything. However, I think we are constantly being mislead and given poor information. The news media does have a role to play in exposing those who are misleading us and in giving us good information.
I am also unsure about my own position on many things. I have been influenced by many things that people have said or written. Yesterday, in an interview, Michael Moore, the film maker, said that when he was in high school he learned from an experience he had that most of the training we get in school and other places teaches us to not stick out neck out because we could create problems for ourselves by doing this. He thinks our society is driven by this kind of thinking and he was ashamed that he had acted that way and failed to defend a fellow student when he should have done this. I am not sure how I will change my thinking because of what Michael said, but I think is right.
LikeLike
I have a distinct memory of a time when I was about 8, walking down the hall of our house, when it came to me quite suddenly that my parents weren’t perfect and actually were sinful people who needed forgiveness just like everybody else. Neither of them had done anything noticeably bad to get me thinking about this, but it was a major shift in my world view, an “aha” moment that put my parents and my relationship with them in an entirly different perspective.
LikeLike
I have the opposite end of that burned in my memory, twice, when each of my kids looked at me when I had screwed up with them and their eyes were saying “he can be wrong.” A lesson they had to learn, but . . .
LikeLike
Cultural anthropology – not so much one class, but the accumulation of them. One professor in particular was good at explaining how our culture shapes beliefs and how we view the world – it provides our “glasses” for looking at most everything. Those glasses lenses are ground by the broader culture and the micro-cultures we all move through. Thinking about these things allows me to sit back sometimes and really think about how a good friend or someone I think of as an otherwise “smart person” could be so blasted wrong (e.g., not hold my same opinion) on a topic. I think the singular class that really brought this home was the medical anthropology course that really dug into how much of our healing arts and how we view “medicine” is tied to culture. When I started teasing apart how things I had thought of as scientific fact are tied to my belief systems in those facts, it really got me thinking further about how much of what I thought of as “fact” was tied to my cultural view of the world.
LikeLike
When I was an undergraduate student, “culture” was a relatively exotic concept. The existence of different cultures led some students to be a bit more modest about their world views. It led the more enterprising young men to tell their girlfriends that the ban on premarital sex was just a cultural artifact, and one that might happily be ignored!
LikeLike
In a teaching methods course senior year, I had an excellent teacher who had us create our own curriculum. I filled mine with all kinds of social studies and humanities, omitting much of the math and science. He gently pointed out how the world really wouldn’t run very well without the balance of all of it, and he was right, of course.
LikeLike
Morning–
Eleventh grade ‘Current Events’ class Mr. Aachor was a fairly new teacher. But slightly older than the usual ‘fresh-out-of-grad-school’ individual and he had a lot of opinions that he freely shared in class. This was 1981 so it was about Iran and the hostage’s among other things. And he would indicate that the school administration didn’t always agree with nor appreciate all his opinions given in the classroom setting.
I don’t remember the topic or conversation but I remember him taking out his billfold and showing us it was empty.
LikeLike
Some of the people who had the greatest influence on me were other students who were activists. There were not many older activist that we could learn from. There were some older ones on the national level, like David Dellinger and the Berrigans, that I admired.
LikeLike
Very nice thoughts here. As a HS teacher I wondered, and still do, how much the point of school is to ground kids, to give them a stable footing (I will go to my death that that is one of the things school are to do) and how to much unsettle them, to awaken them, to teach them to reach, to dare, to think.
I believe that is a contradiction real education must face.
LikeLike
I couldn’t agree more.
Sometimes I think you and I “have” to get together. We have so much in common, and yet with interesting differences. Other times I think we could not get together in person nearly as productively as we do on TB.
LikeLike
I think some of the best teachers are there to give their students a stable footing. Unforunately, I think the over riding message to school children and students is to fit in and follow rules even if you don’t agree with them.
LikeLike
I could add that the over riding tendency to use schools to teach us to follow rules and fit into a mold is seen in the nature the courses. Many classes are very boring, contained a lot of information that you are required to learn which is of little use, and require you sit still at a desk for long periods of time.
LikeLike
So touching on Steve’s excellent topic another way: I worked on this yesterday for my novel. This is one of several short vignettes I insert through the story.You can see if the point is made. Kunst is the father, Jigs is a border collie, Clair is about 8. I put it here because this is a real moment from my childhood, an epiphany I had about land and history
Skidways: a Memory
A warm early spring Sunday late morning.
A perfect day to check the fences before turning the cattle out to graze. Once the fences are secure, the cattle will be turned out, at first for the daytime only. For three or four days the gutter will run messy as the cows complex digestive system adjusts to the chlorophyl; their milk will smell and taste differently.
Fences do not stand up well to winter. Falling trees, wind-blown branches, and wild animals can break or loosen wires or posts. The big enemy is the hard cold, which snaps wires, cracks wood, and, most of all, heaves posts out of the ground.
Because soft earth near the several creeks will not support the tractor, the horse-drawn rubber-tired wagon is loaded with new cedar posts, barbed wire, staples, wiring tools, and the heavy post maul.
It will take a few hours to follow the fence perimeter, Any major break they find will mean more than a day’s work. Clair rides along to be ready to hand materials and tools at need and to learn the task. A day will come when Clair will need this expertise, when his father will have to go to Michigan to find work, when Clair will have to wield the post maul himself. But he suspects no such future on such a fine day. Today Jigs’ life is perfect, as if it is ever imperfect.
They start at the back of the barn, keeping the fence ever on their left. Kunst’s expert eye sights along the line looking for loose wires, missing staples, or posts standing too high. Only occasionally does he stop the wagon, almost always to drive a heaving post back in the ground. He stands in the wagon above the post to be able to swing the maul from the right angle. Here and there a rotted post is replaced. He carefully checks the critical corner posts and their bracing.
After an hour they reach the back-forty pasture, where problems will be much more common on the more rocky ground, where the woods are thicker, and where deer and bear, and even a few moose, roam more freely. Slowly they work their way to the most distant point of their wooded pasture land.
Clair, riding on the tailgate facing backward, feels the wagon ride up over a large bump and drop. And then again. Kunst stops the horse and stands to drive a post. Clair glances off to his right over the barbed wire and sees heading off into the woods beyond their property—he sees . . . he sees . . . he tries to decide what. He stands up in the wagon. Two parallel lines rising a foot or more above the ground. Three feet apart running straight off for fifty yards until he can no longer see them in the brush.
Dropping the maul back down in the wagon bed, Kunst sees where he is looking. “Logging skidways. Eighty, ninety years ago this land was logged off of all the whi’ pine. They laid down big logs in these skidways an’ iced ’em o’er so in the winter the horses could skid out the big logs.”
“They don’t look like logs.”
“That was eighty ninety years ago; they’ve rotted down like that. There’s skidways all over back in there.”
This was a revelation! Something happened here before they owned the land.
His father continues, “Then for a while after that they ran sheep in here. They were brought from Montana inna drought. We bought the back forty on tax-forfeit. That’s why we don’ have clear title to it, but I don’t think anyone’s gonna show up claiming this land.”
Clair does not understand the legalities, but he gets the gist of the point.
Clair now looks at the land differently—as changing, as not quite theirs, with a past, and with a future.
“The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through the din Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life behind steal in.”
John Greenleaf Whittier
LikeLike
I remembered another one. I was a couple years out of college, taking evening courses at San Francisco State to complete my teaching credential. The Psychology of Women class sounded interesting, though I figured it would be somewhat about feminism. I already knew I was NOT a feminist, from a rather negative encounter I’d had with a radical feminist back in school. It took only a couple of sessions for me to become a lifelong feminist. Makes me wonder what else I know so little about that I should keep my mouth shut…
LikeLike
Oops, an ectopic post.
LikeLike
Nice Clyde, thanks.
Part of the old Wells Fargo stagecoach trail runs through our township. The township is currently in discussion with a couple of property owners regarding easement rights and part of the current easement is through the pasture and across an old bridge that follows the stagecoach trail.
LikeLike
Cool. Did it go to What’s it called in the State Park there, Forest City?
LikeLike
Doing some quick Google-ing here I get the impression it was part of the Dubuque trail between there and St. Paul.
LikeLike
I love the precise detail, Clyde. And I’ve just been reflecting on this view of land. It often does have a history of which we are ignorant, something complicating our simple view of things.
LikeLike
Very good story, Clyde. It has a great combination of things I like to read about; farming, the North country, history, and how people lived and worked.
LikeLike
Thank you.
Not sure where it is going; just added these memories as vignettes; it’s turning into a sort of seed saver project in words as much as anything else, trying to preserve in words a now extinct way of life.
LikeLike
Indeed Clyde – lovely details in this vignette. I can almost hear the squeak of the wagon and smell the dirt.
LikeLike
clyde, bravo bravo,, encore encore
keep it up man. this is great stuff. the attentin to all the senses come alive and the recollections of a time gone by will be your legacy. make it happen while your fingers are working and or find the recorder that will allow you to do it out of guilt even when you feel disabled in the pain. it would be a good distraction i’ll bet and we all get ot hear more of the memories through that special filter that you absorb life through. the details and the visualations of the fence mending are wonderful . clair facing out the back of the wagn but knowing tha the would need to be able to use these references when it was his time is a wonderful narative on the gears turning inside his head. such a treat to hear a story told with the voice you have chosen. a collection of vignettes is the way amy tan started too. it wasmaeant to be a ollection of stores of people who grew up in the same time and the same place and then it dawned on her how it fir tgether and the joy luck club was never thought of any way other than the finished final version of the second edition. how about a little our town take on clairs neighborhood, keep it going and going and going. i could read your stuff all day.
LikeLike
Many years ago I had my purse stolen (not yet aware it was missing, I was discussing the pitfalls of materialism with a friend… the irony was impossible to ignore). I was now a “victim” of theft, which sent me down an unfamiliar path… checks were forged, credit cards used, my financial dealings became difficult at best, and an ugly side of myself emerged. I had always been about “fair” and “right” so, the more I endured, the more pissed off & bitter I became… I wanted to catch the guy and make him pay. A lesson by the Dalai Lama snapped my head around… “If, in the grip of violent desire or cruel necessity, an unfortunate person steals our possessions… be full of compassion & dedicate to this person our possessions.” I REALLY had to work at this! But I must say, all of the negative emotions were lifted and a new light shone on the situation… and now, I am forever changed.
LikeLike
Wow. Thanks for this, mn firefly.
LikeLike
that old dahli lahma comes through every now and then. it is like the simplest version of a answer to one of lifes little challanges is the best answer, strive for happiness.
LikeLike
Thanks, Steve-
Maybe it is just the mood I am in today, but this has made me think of something in a way I never have before. I was brought up in a pretty conservative household in a pretty conservative town. I knew nothing else.
Off I went to Luther College, where my poor parents shelled out good money to have me turned into a bleeding-heart lefty (who still manages her personal finances like a conservative-except for the giving part). It all really started with the professor I had the first January term I was there-Genetic Ethics. It really all started with the fact that she had kept her maiden name after marriage-I had NEVER encountered something like that before (and I am not all THAT old either). She had the smarts to explain (patiently) to us that the reason she had done that was because she had a substantial body of work to her credit with her maiden name, and no reputation whatsoever with her husband’s at the time of their marriage. Made perfect sense.
We had a lot of good debates/discussions in there. It was a different era and a rarified setting.
Of course, it was all downhill from there…
LikeLike
This blog seems to have tapped an odd array of interesting and moving stories from you guys. I want to respond to some here, but mundane rules force me to leave the computer for a while. I’m so impressed with baboon sharing. You folks are amazing.
LikeLike
Sort of related to topic: my version of the truth of last Sunday’s BBC has been posted. For the others of you who were there, please feel free to comment on the veracity of my reporting.
LikeLike
I believe your version of events is truthful. I also believe that my beliefs are essentially correct. I only question my beliefs when I don’t really believe them.
LikeLike
steve. magnificent blog today thanks. i am having computer and calander issues these days. the blog stars off and i am not aware steve is guest blogging and i am surprised at the new tone he had taken, after about 3 or 4 paragraphs i was onto the oversight and too involved in the story to go back and confirm then it went on and i was laughing at how i was way too involved to go back but by then i didn’t need to.
anyway… the good teachers i had were ofte teachers from outside the classroom. many teachers found me much more tolerable when not in their classroom. i had a science teacher who taught in the school but i never had him as a teacher. he is still a friend today. he accepted me and celebrated the individuality i brought to the party. i had a sales manager who got the lightbulb to go on and allow me to realize that not many people get it like i do. there are a lot of slugs out there and i had been unable to recognize the fact that i had the ability to see and do things they were not doing. i realied my views were really all i had. i don’t ever apoligize but i do acknowledge that i make a lot of mistakes and that is the glorious part of the ride. to be allowed to do it and arn form it and go on from there. i get tired of doubling back to cover my errors but i am geting better at anticipating things and the vision i enter a new project with is very different than it was 20, 10 5 or 3 years ago. i keep slugging it out and the teachers who taught me to learn are the ones i have to thank. there were some who taught me huge lessons on things i wanted no part of and that is maybe more important than the things you do wnt to be a part of. helps narrow down lifes direction.
fun blog today. yesterday, all week, i get ot look in but not when or with the participation option i enjoy. keep it up gang. us lurkers enjoy the daily banter too.
LikeLike