♫ ♪ "summer lingers through September / In Camelot"

 

Hyannis Port 

I started watching (listening to) something on Netflix called "MA 370:  The Plane That Disappeared."

It's interesting, and good.  I'm not quite to the end of the second episode, & I don't know how many episodes there are.

I did not want to go to Google to see what happened, because I would rather keep listening to the story and find out the answer (or lack of an answer) that way.

        (As the kids say -- "no spoilers!")

A mystery.

And as I was thinking yesterday that the assassination of President Kennedy was the "Mystery of the 20th Century" -- it occurred to me earlier today, to see a connection -- or, a similarity -- between the missing plane and the murdered president.

        The connection is:  when there's a mystery, people start trying to solve it themselves, and then that becomes a tangle of controversy.  The various people or groups of people working on the mystery start to get mad at each other:  "My theory is right!"

        "No, mine!"

        Etc.

And anyone watching or listening or reading starts to get tired and give up.

"They're just completely wrong."

"Their theory is nonsense."

Various people -- "experts" -- say that about one another.

It devolves into personal attacks, when someone cannot prove someone else's theory wrong:  "Jim Garrison was a crackpot!"

OK.  Maybe you're the crackpot.

(What is a "crackpot"?)

______________________________

Like with the Kennedy assassination, in the Malaysian airplane mystery, there's a belief among some observers and experts that someone knows something and they are keeping it from us.

Then somebody will step in and say, in a very authoritative tone and style, that 'people cannot keep secrets.'  If there was an answer to the mystery, somebody would have said it by now, and made it public, because people cannot keep secrets.

There's a quote from Benjamin Franklin:  "Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead."

Well -- it sounds clever and cynical and all-knowing to say these things, and generalize, but it isn't true.

It is possible to keep a secret, and lots of people and groups do keep secrets.

        I think the reason why some people like saying (loudly) "PEOPLE CANNOT KEEP SECRETS!" is because they may have had the experience of trusting someone with a secret and then getting betrayed when the person tells it to somebody.

        It was a negative experience for them, and there's an urge to alleviate the painful feelings by saying, "Everyone would do this.  You cannot trust anybody.  No one can keep a secret."

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