Progressing as a person is essential, if you are stagnant and unwilling to learn, be challenged and change then stagnant you will be, and you will not have lived a fulfilled life. I know that this is a sweeping statement, and some will not agree, but that is Ok as we are all allowed to have different opinions. If we all thought as one there would be no challenge, no growth and a bleak blanket future where the world was always a consistent and unexplorable grey.
Recently there has been a lot of press and commentary on Dan Reed’s Michael Jackson documentary ‘Leaving Netherland’. Instagram, twitter, Facebook and not forgetting Pierce Morgan on This Morning Britain, have been debating the content of the documentary and what it reveals and presents as truth. In our office we have touched on sweeping comments ‘what were the parents doing’, he was a ‘child in his mind’, all comments I cannot deny had passed and sat in my consciousness. I had not yet watched the documentary, put off by the comments of the graphic description and wall that I didn’t want to be confronted with what went on in the home/homes of a man whose music I have always loved, and my young boys have grown to enjoy. Yet still I made contributions to the conversations, not the social media ones, but within the confines of my office walls.
Then I realised, how can you comment on something without submerging yourself in the evidence around it? Is it not ridiculous to have an opinion based solely on what you think you know through the history of the media, your upbringing and the family and time in which you were raised, and your opinions grew? And, it is just that ridiculous! Our childhood, youth, our history, the day before today all informs your viewpoints, but if they are only built on a small enclosed, confined segment of a society that you know, then how can you stand by that opinion with immovable force? So many people do, and this is the stagnant grey – the mass of society that will not progress, will not learn, grow or ever be willing to be malleable.
The reason I think many of us exist in the rock-solid grey is it is easier. Is it not easy to have an opinion and stick to that rigidly? To learn of alternative views is to admit you were wrong and no one seems to enjoy saying I was wrong. But what is wrong with being wrong? It is not a failure to be wrong, it is a chance to grow to be malleable and to move away from the grey and add some vibrant colour to your views about a world that exists far behind your home, your office and the town/city in which one lives.
So I knew I had to watch the documentary, it was crucial to my being able to be involved in the discussion and to understand what lead society to accept the abuse and what lead the families to allow their children to be exposed to the abuse. Judgement without facts is lazy, archaic, naïve and sits you in the grey. I couldn’t jump straight in. I was still too concerned about its effects on me and my sometimes pathetic and intolerable ability to listen to real life harrowing stories, so I did my usual trick and researched around it.
A good trick for gaining current ideas/viewpoints and opinions is the wonderful world of podcasts, so I researched the name of the director and input Dan Reed in to podcast search- out popped one of my favourite podcasts The High Low, who had done a special interviewing Reed on the documentary. However, it was not just the interview with Reed that informed me, but a line Dolly Alderton had chosen to insert from the writer Marlon James (who I had never heard of – so is someone I may go on to explore) in which he said:
“reading about a slave getting whipped is probably hard, but you know what it’s a little easier than getting whipped. Reading about abuse is probably hard, but it’s a little nicer than being abused. You don’t have to endure these things but you should know what they are”
How can you not read this and understand his point? Acknowledge that knowledge is better than experience and surely the basic fundamental point is that if we do not know what has gone before how can we move in to an educated, safer and more knowledgeable future, where these hideous things do not happen, or if they do then they don’t go on hidden and without justice. And so last night I put on the documentary……
muddledmummymoss 