Robert Simpson: Don’t confuse me with pesky facts

I have complained more than once in the past about the tendency of people to cling to what they want to believe in, regardless of facts. What one believes about other cultures, other religious beliefs, other political views, other governments – once formed, these opinions quite often take permanent root and will never be dislodged, no matter the facts that come to light.

Being a member of the human race and subject to all its weaknesses, I do not free myself from suspicion of being an unsupported belief clinger. So I try to do a sort of self-analysis from time to time, the way a computer runs its own self-check, to make sure I’m not hanging on to beliefs that have been proven not to be supported by facts. I may or may not be successful in this effort. I admire those people who are.

In the turbulent time of the 1960s, Americans developed and clung to widely divergent points of view on politics, war, and all kinds of social norms that had been accepted in the past with few questions and by a huge majority. Many of us, and I was one, nurtured an active dislike of the hippie segment of our culture in general and a number of anti-Vietnam War activists in particular. I felt that a lot of them didn’t really know all that much about the war and that their positions were often self-serving. One of the most obvious representatives of the counterculture, and therefore one I most disliked, was the singer-activist Joan Baez. I didn’t know that much about Ms. Baez personally, but she represented a lot of things I despised, and I mentally held her accountable.

A lot of years passed. The country changed some and so did I, but not to the extent of agreeing with very much of what the singer-activist had seemed to represent. Not that I spent all that much time thinking about Joan Baez, now that the national fever seemed to have abated slightly. So it was a surprise when it turned out there was something about the lady that I could deeply admire.

Baez spent years lambasting the U.S. government for engaging in the Vietnam War. She made a trip to Hanoi in 1972 which drew much angry criticism, her alleged purpose of taking Christmas gifts to American prisoners of war considered by many a sham. But her activism increased beyond simple opposition to the war, and she expanded her efforts to foster universal human rights and nonviolence. While such interests may seem, from this vantage point, understandable and non-threatening to most of us, at that time it was easy to dismiss her actions as those of a starry-eyed idealist who stood in opposition to our troops and what they were trying to accomplish.

Then the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam, and many peace activists suddenly lost their major target and floundered for a while with little to protest against. But not Baez. She became aware of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and by the North Vietnamese against the South Vietnamese, and she spoke out. In her efforts to encourage nonviolence and universal human rights, she saw the larger picture. She was convinced that we had been wrong in fighting the Vietnam War, but she did not conclude that that made our former enemies automatically right and to be forgiven for their atrocities against other humans.

Joan Baez’s former colleagues and fellow dissidents were largely outraged by her position. They did not wish to condemn the North Vietnamese nor the Khmer Rouge, presumably because that would seem to ally them with their own government, something they could not abide. Baez said they had “an eye disease,” in which people see only what they prefer to see. She condemned their attachment to ideology. She had been blessed by never having such a blinding attachment, she said, and thus, “I believe I am capable of seeing out of both eyes.”

I never thought I would someday hold Joan Baez up as a role model for other Americans. But in this instance, she exhibits something that we desperately need, and that seems to be so often lacking: The ability to see out of both eyes.

This story was originally published March 12, 2016 at 7:01 PM with the headline "Robert Simpson: Don’t confuse me with pesky facts."