What's taught and what's true

Things plague me that probably shouldn't. When things are supposed to be one way, then suddenly they aren't that way, then it bothers me. I guess that has to do with trying to live life in the best possible way based on the information we have available to us. And it bothers me even more when people continue thinking in the vein of what changed when clearly the change has made something very different.

A number of examples can be cited. In history, I was taught how great a president Lincoln was. But, through the years, I have come to see that he barely won his presidency, and his administration was every bit as divisive as any that have existed in modern times. In English, I was taught that "proper" language was the basis of a good education. The truth is that educated people speak pretty much like everyone else their age, and the notion of "proper" is associated with a dying breed of grammarians who had delusions of a golden age of education in the country. In education, I was taught that having a solid foundation with a liberal arts education would propel me into the future with a solid base of financially appearing better than those without a complete education. But, the job market is much more complex than reduction to a platitude. Many with lesser amounts of education than I have are doing quite well and sport a higher level of quality of life than I will ever achieve. In geology, Tectonic Plate Theory is still new enough that many discount its ramifications that the Earth's crust has evolved over a really long period of time. In theology, I was taught that the Bible pretty much came from heaven. But it has a traceable history, signs of borrowing from sectarian culture, and a hint that politics determined some of the outcome of the books in it.

I watch many documentaries about what archaeologists have found from the ancient world. The more we dig, the more we find that it is a silly notion to think that the world of prehistory was crude. Toilets and hot/cold water capability was found in the Minoan civilization in the third millennium BCE. Cities have been found underground in beautifully carved caves, underwater with precision cut stones for highways and fortifications, and under existing towns with gold and weaponry in their burial sites. Relics have been found from humans at the time of the disappearance of the last ice age. Paintings have been found in cavern systems that illustrate the life and environment of people around 30,000 BCE. Three different species of humans inhabited the Earth at the same time, albeit a short time.

I guess my main beef is that all the changes make truth "a hard deer to hunt," to use Stephen Vincent Binet's term from his short story By the Waters of Babylon. I walk on a shifting foundation. What I thought I could count on turns out to be relative. That does something to my thinking. It makes me tentative.

Then again, who gave me the idea that I live in a black and white world anyway? I was one of the people that was taught that the world was stable and certain and dependable. I just need to forget that and move on with my life.