ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 13, 1997 TAG: 9704140015
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: dispatches from rye hollow
SOURCE: STEVE KARK
Years ago there was this old guy who used to hang out at the doughnut shop in downtown Blacksburg. He liked to sit with folks while they sat down and had a cup of coffee and maybe wolfed down a doughnut or two.
You mostly tolerated him, unless you found yourself in one of those "antisocial" funks when you barely tolerated your own company, let alone some glassy-eyed geezer getting in your face about government conspiracies and flying saucers.
As I recall, he was partial to talking with students from Virginia Tech, especially young women. I guess he figured there was book learning and then there was real learning, the kind they don't teach in school. And he made it his responsibility that the students got both. Either that or he was a dirty old man. Pick one.
As I said, one of his favorite subjects was government conspiracies. He had an old black sedan he used to park out front, and in its rear window he put a hand-lettered sign that read, "I will give $5,000 to anyone who can prove that people walk on the moon."
Saying he was a bit over the top would be a little like saying Attila the Hun was a tad too assertive. He stretched the limits, to be sure. I recall overhearing him say that the Apollo lunar landings, in the news at the time, were faked. He said the TV images of astronauts hopping around on the moon were actually broadcast from a secret hangar somewhere in the desert.
Despite his lack of faith in human accomplishments, he had an unwavering abundance of faith in "the people from Mars." They were responsible, he proclaimed, for everything from Kennedy's assassination to that year's bad corn.
With the smugness that hindsight provides, it's easy for me to sit back now and say he was about three green stamps shy of a toaster. He had no problem accepting that Martians shuffled through his corn at night, but couldn't for the world accept that people might likewise shuffle through a field of dusty lunar boulders.
Even if Neil Armstrong himself stopped by for a jelly-filled and coffee, the old guy still wouldn't have believed him.
Anyway, I was a lot younger when all this happened. And though I worked hard at establishing my own individuality, I was mostly intolerant of anyone with similar aspirations, especially if that someone was older than me. Such is youth.
I think back to that old guy and I see him a little differently. I tend to be a lot more open-minded. After all, now we have conspiracies aplenty, and even respected scientists talk about life on Mars. The old man was, except in degree, more right on both counts than I.
Besides, we live in a world where quite often the unreal becomes real. In most cases this is a wonderful thing. We can look at clouds through the lens of a satellite 22,000 miles above the equator. We can listen to static from the beginning of our universe. We can even look inside a beating heart or listen to a whale sing.
On the other side if the coin, though, there are those who are too willingly deceived.
By now we've all heard about those people who thought they might hitch a ride behind a comet by casting aside their "earthly containers." We like to say to ourselves that these people were too open-minded, too willing to put their faith in someone the rest of us see as a crackpot.
But underneath maybe it worries us a little because we wonder how people could allow themselves to be so easily taken in. After all, like us, they were only human. We might declare that they were mentally unbalanced, but, except for their last act, they appeared normal to most people who knew them.
Maybe what they really lacked was a dose of common sense. There's nothing wrong with having an open mind, but one needs to know the limits. For most of us, this doesn't include the possibility of "beaming up" to a mother ship and starting a new life. More likely, we might become a doughnut philosopher, like the old guy with the sedan. Things could be worse.
You want to have an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.
LENGTH: Medium: 75 linesby CNB