At high noon on January 1 – and absently I checked my watch and sure enough it was twelve noon exactly – I heard what sounded like a woman screaming at a main intersection near here.
As I drove in that direction, I thought I should call for back up but as the crying was coming from a location quite close by, curiosity overcame caution and in short order there she was.
She was dressed well enough, not disheveled, or wild-eyed as I imagined she would be, but she was standing smack dab in the middle of the road forcing cars to slow, occasionally stop, but then creep on.
She was gesturing quite animatedly, alternatively raising her outstretched arms heavenward, then clasping her hands atop her head as if incredulous, exasperated at something or someone.
I rolled down my window as it became my turn in the traffic queue to come near.
‘How long will you that are so thoughtless pursue thoughtlessness? How long will you ridicule and deride, delight in scoffing? How long will you obstinately mock the truth?’
The thought crossed my mind – briefly – that what she was advocating, and stopping traffic in doing so, causing tie-ups of busy people with places to go, and schedules to keep in this New Year, would require time, commitment, effort, and diligence and, well, thinking, and who has time for that?
Kind of like a book on virtues for young people featured in the Fiction section of the second hand store, character, wisdom, and the discipline and due diligence it takes to develop such qualities is anymore passé.
Challenging the status quo, rocking the boat, ending the go-along-to-get-along mentality that describes the great majority of mankind, hopelessly adrift, subject to every shift of wind and tide – well, that’s asking a bit much isn’t it?
Pulling back curtains, turning over rocks, peering behind facades, calling power to account, well that’s beyond the pale is it not?
The impatient guy in the car behind me had evidently given up honking his horn that somehow I hadn’t heard in my reverie for now in my rear view mirror I saw his door open and the expression on his face as he headed my way suggested I best take advantage of the open road ahead.
So, like the others, I moved on.
Full disclosure. This is meant to be a parable. I should have made that clear within the original. The scenario described is not literal. Some readers on social media were concerned about the welfare of the woman screaming in the intersection. She is not the problem. The passers-by are the problem, those who do not heed her warning.
This was an attempt, admittedly not necessarily successful, to modernize an ancient portrayal of Wisdom as personified in Proverbs 1:20ff.
My apologies for the confusion.
And yet therein lies perhaps an ironic twist that brings, as it turns out, fuller meaning to the truth of the matter.
It is not the town-crier here with her warning against the perils of thoughtless trivial pursuit who needs to be rescued.
It’s us.
It’s as Herbert Sebastian Agar, American journalist and historian said, “The truth that sets us free is often a truth that we do not want to know.”