There is a stark difference between being passionate about one’s principles and exhibiting behavior that suggests such passion. The former flows uncontrollably through one’s veins. The latter may conceal apathy or dishonesty or complex, self-serving motives. The former tends to engender trust among open-minded observers. The latter tends to create wariness and suspicion in skeptics—especially skeptics who have a history of being misled by slick fabulists. Between those two sets of witnesses, though, lies an almost boundless “middle;” people whose innate uncertainty makes them indecisive until something sways them one way or another. That something can be as random as a coin flip or as precise as an encounter with incontrovertible evidence. But evidence—even hard evidence—can be staged; it’s done all the time.
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My computer monitor, upon “waking,” displays a random Nature photograph from around the globe—frequently beautiful, always interesting. Each photo is identified by unobtrusive text explanations in the upper right corner of the screen. This morning, the monitor woke to display a beautiful photograph of a flock of pink long-legged birds standing, against a backdrop of distant mountains, in a shallow expanse of water. It was labeled Flamingos in the Republic of Türkiye. The description immediately struck me as hilariously funny…as if the caption referenced the nationality of those birds. Would the creatures look appreciably different, I wondered, if they were instead identified by geographic political affiliation…such as Republican Flamingos in Southern Texas? What if the photo had been captioned Sunni Muslim Flamingos in Predominantly Shia Area of Iraq? I may be the only human being on the planet who finds the photo caption funny. Unique? Crazy?
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I’ve been up for an hour, hearing peals of thunder and listening to rain drops pelt the window panes. Those sounds are like lullabies, coaxing me to sleep. I just woke, in my chair, to find my screen covered with the letter “d.” Like this: dddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd…but a much, much longer string of letters.
