REFER TO GREY: Contemplations by Robert Greigos © 2007-2025

I recorded the above faces in 2018 at Venice Beach CA, in the Los Angeles area. It was at about this time of year, late August early September. It was also just over half way through the first Trump administration. We hadn’t yet reached the Covid-19 era. The economy in the US was finally emerging from the Great Recession. Massive US Federal economic stimulus was beginning to take hold. People were again beginning to feel the warmth of sun on their faces, in a figurative sense. At the same time, Trump was insisting any break in the gloom was all his doing. Far far from the truth. In fact, the relative easing of at least US economic strife was the result of many many ordinary citizens and public officials taking both the actual facts and their responsibilities toward each other very seriously. Trump chest thumping antics amounted to nothing more than annoying noise in the system.

I look now at those three young faces and I see two, maybe three things. First, all three are looking forward in their mind’s eye toward something beyond their immediate selves. Toward a planned or desired experience ahead, perhaps. With friends, with someone special, toward a new adventure? Second, their faces and body language, especially the two on the right, betray a spattering of worry and concern mixed with determination. Chalk that up to the continuous uncertainties of the previous few years, I’d guess. We all had our worries. Anyway, it definitely isn’t joy and elation on their faces. And it definitely isn’t fantasized conspiracies chasing them, either. They aren’t carrying guns. They aren’t carrying protest signs or wearing political hats and t-shirts. They aren’t displaying overt signs of disease or addiction. They don’t look homeless and impoverished. They also don’t look particularly rich. All three appear to be surviving, existing within a more or less normative bubble. That’s something to be relatively proud of, a mark of success for the previous several years of facing actual facts and working earnestly toward mutual success in solving our collective problems, despite the noise. Bravo, I’d say. I’d also wonder: Now, can you keep it up? Or, will all three of you lose both faith in each other and productive focus midst the increasing noise to come?

I don’t have any after pictures of those three, after like today, half a year into the second Trump administration, when the noise has become almost deafening. But I wish I had. I’d like to see if their relative relief from a break in the gloom has lasted. And whether their relative optimism of believing there is a future before them has lasted. I’d wonder if they’ve been forced by the increasing noise to abandon trust and willingness to coordinate earnest efforts with their neighbors and fellow workers. I’d wonder if they had decided to marry and bring children into this world. I’d wonder if they’d found resources to buy a house. I’d wonder if they’d managed to escape addiction of one sort or another, and if they’d escaped tragedy due to Covid-19 or hunger or some other disease or even smoke from increasing forest fires. None of which are problems this second Trump administration clown show are likely to solve, though for sure those problems will be addressed with finger pointing and fantasized “alternative facts”, and puffed up hollow, ineffectual, unConstitutional, and illegal schemes. Their ignominious creed being: Forget the possibility of error. Just do it.

Black, brown, white, or anything in between, we are all living on this same planet, within the same tenuous bubble of survivability. It is very likely we may have finally reached the limit of sustainability for our species as a whole. Indications are that there are just too many of us. We have tried to build an ever higher tower, and it has begun to tip and sink into the ground beneath us. Many within our number have intuitively or even intentionally chosen to forego bringing children into this world, in a brave but sad effort to help ease the growing pressure on our sustaining collective bubble. Others are mounting hate campaigns and even wars in an effort ease the growing malignant pressures. Nothing brave or praiseworthy in those efforts. Ignorance and lack of effective imagination plagues us all at times. Feelings of fear especially trip us up. And that noise. It definitely hobbles us and blinds us to the real. Yes, the real, our ever present friend, if we could only see it clearly, hear and understand its distant soothing music.

Do you know what a primary source is? You should. It’s important to know exactly what it is if you want to stay close to a useful understanding of what is actually real and what isn’t. What your friends and media feeds are saying are, for the most part, not primary sources of information. Their pronouncements amount, in large part, to hearsay. They are secondary sources of information, highly processed and adulterated, in the language of food at your local grocery. In other words, they are likely to be full of errors, both intentional and inadvertent. Primary sources, on the other hand, are more like original documents and first-person accounts, like what your own eyes and ears are revealing to you and how you interpret and make sense of that direct experience. Yes, original documents and first person accounts can be lies and even what you make of what you yourself are seeing and hearing can be wrong, a misjudgment, or even a prejudiced hallucination. Same for everyone. Error is, unfortunately, human. One must not discount the likelihood of error in first person accounts or even in original documents. Then there are hard facts, untarnished, unadulterated, unmanufactured evidence, like undoctored visual records, blood samples, DNA traces, time stamps, and skid marks. And in all of that, context is important to consider. What surrounding and prior events and forces have likely acted to have resulted in the production of those examples of suspected evidence? Finally, one must ask how the provided evidence is being interpreted. Is it with preconception and bias, discounting some facts while highlighting only part of the evidence? Is it with clear and valid logic as to how the world as a whole actually works? Do most independent and uninvolved interpreters concur, or are they offering several incompatible competing interpretations? And, are subsequent tests being considered to help sort out which interpretations are likely most correct?

Difficult, isn’t it? So, how can we ever know for sure something we think we know is real? And how can we ever reasonably count on our plans, promises, and commitments turning out just as we’d dreamed? Those are not trivial questions. Not questions to be brushed off with a dismissive hand wave or a “Oh, don’t worry about that.” bit of advice.

I’ve brought this up before. Consider the five blind men encountering an elephant for the very first time. One man inadvertently bumps into the elephant’s side and concludes an elephant must be like a wall. A second man encounters the elephant’s tusk and declares it to be smooth hard and curved, not like a wall at all. A third, slapped in the face by the elephant’s ear, declares it to be like a huge leaf. The fourth encounters the elephant’s trunk and jumps back believing an elephant to be more like a large snake. The fifth blind man hears a sudden very loud shriek and feels the ground tremble beneath his feet. He is aghast and can only imagine an elephant to be some kind of terrifying monster. The point is, no single blind man perceives and understands the entirety of an elephant all by himself. But, by putting all the pieces together, with no one deliberately lying or exaggerating, all five could eventually end up with a pretty clear, faithful, and possibly useful understanding of what an elephant actually is.

The lesson from that story is, of course, that we all need both our own honesty and the honesty of those around us to share productively in the interpretation of direct evidence, our experience of that evidence, and all of our tentative interpretations of that evidence. Jumping to half baked conclusions and wild speculations on our own or buying into the same by others will never get us anywhere near an interpretation that is truly useful. In fact, that route is more likely to increase general waste and misfortune and lock us into a windowless inhibiting cage of fear with no way out.

But, as it turns out, the world we live in is likely far less incomprehensible, more mysteriously full of wonder, and actually more accommodating than we might have imagined, especially if we pay far less unearned attention to all the self-serving noise being propagated these days. My advice would be to find a group of friends whose thinking and experience you respect and then try to learn from them. And don’t be shy about asking your own tough questions and getting their thoughts on what you think you might have discovered. Together you and they, if both you and they are conscientious about minimizing error, could discover that this overly filled bubble we exist within is or could be a whole lot less cramped and menacing than recent evidence would seem to indicate.

Be well. Be safe. And remember, real truth is our ever present reliable friend and does have soothing, healing, and productive power if only we could actually, without error, discover it.

Just as an aside, one Internet site I find to be exceptionally illuminating and a welcome escape from the daily disturbing chronicle of our times offered through regular media organizations is Science Daily. Yes, it is a secondary source. But it is a stellar example of translation from difficult primary source jargon to clear illumination of what earnest seeking others have recently discovered about the inner workings of our world. And some of those discoveries portend fabulously useful problem solving applications. Bravo Science Daily. And, Bravo to all the dedicated seekers of what is actually real that they follow.