You Can't Handle the Truth!

One of my favorite lines comes from one of my favorite movies, A Few Good Men, during a heated courtroom cross examination by Tom Cruise (Lt. Daniel Kaffee) to the great Jack Nicholson (Col. Nathan R. Jessep)...

Jessep: You want answers?
Kaffee: I think I'm entitled to them.
Jessep: You want answers?
Kaffee: I want the truth!
Jessep: You can't handle the truth!

You can't handle the truth. Wow. So powerful. So to the point.

I was reminded of this line when reading through a Village Voice article about the 9/11 inside job protests at ground zero this past Sunday. It contained a quote from a 9/11 victim's family member about their thoughts of 9/11 being a conspiracy. I've omitted the person's last name, because I'm not bringing up what they said to try to embarrass them, but rather to illustrate my point...

9-11 Conspiracists Invade Ground Zero

"It seemed most family members did their best to ignore the speakout. "That's what this country is about, that people can say what they want even if I don't agree with it," said Rudy..., whose brother William died in the North Tower, leaving behind a wife and two kids. "To have more fingerpointing and Congressional hearings, where does that get us? I can't live with myself to think that that was a conspiracy," he said, clearly pained at the thought of even having to address such a question." -Village Voice (09/12/05)

This person's comment exemplifies why I think people don't believe in government conspiracies. It's not that they don't believe they happen, they don't want to believe they happen. They can't handle the truth.

I'm mean you really can't blame this poor guy for not wanting to think that factions in his own government might have been the one's who were really behind the murder of his brother and almost 3,000 others in his country when all this time his government has been telling him that it was some evil group of foreign terrorists who were responsible. It's like if your parents were murdered in their home and one of your siblings, who was living with them, told you that it was some intruder who broke in in the middle of the night who killed them and you lived for years with the belief that the culprit was some low-life scumbag that you didn't know, but then later after re-examining the case, all the evidence points that it was your own sibling who really did it.

For not wanting to even think about questioning his own government on this, this person will never find out who really murdered his brother and if no one else questions things, the real culprits will likely remain free to kill again.

Yes, the truth can be quite painful. It can make us choose to live the comfortable lie instead. It can make us live in denial, but at what point does a country suffer when most of it's citizens live in denial? I can think of a dozen brutal dictators in the last half century that were glad their citizens choose to live in denial rather than wake up to the cold hard realities of what was going on at the time before these dictators rose to power.

When it comes to questioning potential government corruption and/or complicity in a crime, such as with 9/11, the people shouldn't fear the truth. They should fear not getting at the truth.

So let me end by giving you one of my other favorite lines...

"The truth shall set you free!"