When I named this blog "Mind your own reality" I thought I was on to a clever idea. I think it's turned out to be a private joke that only I get (or that only I think is clever,) but that's okay. Basically, I was thinking one day about how our own perspectives and experiences influence our understanding of the "facts" around us. Each of us has a slightly (or sometimes vastly) different background, and therefore one person's take on what's going on around us-- "the facts"-- is ALWAYS going to differ slightly from the next person's. So we all have our own reality, and they are all valid. It's like an opinion. You can't say my reality is wrong, and I can't say yours is. So mind your own. (It sounds less and less clever as I explain, but at the time, it was an "Ah-ha" idea to me...)This morning reading the Herald, I found the best illustration of the concept: two accounts of an arrest outside Stone Hearth Pizza in Needham on Friday. You remember Friday afternoon- Needham was in lockdown after a guy installing a sprinkler system at a residence murdered the owner of the home sparking a televised manhunt. During that time, human rights activist Hillel Neuer, having finished giving a report at Yale, stopped in to the pizzeria to eat, change clothes and call a cab... Two realities resulted-- the one of the spooked Needhamites unaccustomed to lockdown and strangers acting differently, and the one of the busy international human rights activist unaware of the situation but with somewhere to go. (Check out the two pictures of Hillel's realities above, shaking Kofi Annan's hand at an earlier date, and being arrested outside the pizza shop at gunpoint.) Maybe it's my caffeine buzz, but I think this is fascinating:
Needhamites:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/general/view.bg?articleid=1042854
Busy activist:
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/general/view.bg?articleid=1042864
If you had been having a pizza that afternoon, what would your reality have been like?
2 comments:
I am not sure what my reaction would have been in the heat of the moment.
But it is scary that the police charged him with disorderly conduct for his part (or lack of part) in the whole situation.
At least the judge saw the light and dismissed the charges......
I'm just glad he wasn't a brown-skinned person. Remember when cops in Wellesley pulled out their guns on a player for the Boston Celtics, who was sitting in his car during the day waiting for his wife? A pink-skinned woman called the cops b/c she thought he looked like a bank robber!
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