Impossible Things

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Alice laughed. “There's no use trying,” she said. “One can't believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen.

                                                                         --Lewis Carroll

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     The gullible among us are swarming like bees in this contentious season. Willing—even eager—to accept the slightest, weakest absurdity. “Tell me anything,” they seem to say, “and watch me consume it ravenously!” With what approaches gluttony, the naïve acceptance of thin claims by many of us matches Salem’s determined pursuit of witches in the 17th century: where there’s willfulness there’s witches! Vaccines causing autism! Haitians eating our pets! Wind farms causing cancer!

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     The kinds of things we all believed as children and abandoned in the light of reason creep back sullenly, like overripe mulberries waiting to be picked off the ground where they fell. I did this more than once as a child—easier than jumping to grasp the out-of-reach fresh ones! More often disappointed by spoilage than rewarded, I gave it up about the time I accepted the truth about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

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     But many modern fabrications fight to stay alive. Gullibility and trust are cousins, and to doubt the more fanciful sometimes risks losing faith in the more reliable. Making the distinction is not so easy nowadays, when continued repetition strongly encourages belief, and when new fables are being added by the dizzying daily dozen.

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     What are we to do? I, for one, focus on unbelief—seeking out factual discrepancies in presumably innocent claims and disbelieving them. It’s become a parlor game with me, much like the “I spy” game we used to play on road trips: “I spy something red and white,” one of us would say, spotting a distant stop sign. So now maybe I read a news report: “I spy something that can’t possibly be true!” I say. When it’s a game, I’m not appalled by discovering untruth. I relish it.

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     I once spotted six impossible things before breakfast and disbelieved them all, one after the other, by lunchtime. I’m proud of myself! The Queen would be horrified.

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Ron Wetherington