Strange pain.

A wind blowing over the mountains suggests a front moving through, and I awaken unable to rest. My thoughts return to this question of belief systems, and a few recent personal examples force themselves on my awareness.

I think, for example, of listening to an intelligent, well-read, conscientous and thoughtful woman who with great passion in her voice praises Richard M Nixon for his courage in resigning in the face of Watergate, seeing him still now as an exemplar of moral uprightness. "Compared to Bill Clinton what he did was nothing, but he knew the right thing to do and he did it."

This makes my head spin, and even considering it brings me to such discomfort I'm just speechless.

Along a similar vein, we have the rage no small number of people, my son among them, are feeling/expressing from their perception of having been lied to by Mr Obama, whom they claim was actually born in Kenya.

These are the people, one and the same, who worshiped and idolized a president and administration who practiced an intentional policy of governing through lies and deceit, including taking the country to a war resulting in tens of millions of deaths, massive relocations of entire populations, destruction of the moral authority of the American nation, shattering of the strongest economy in the history of the world, and on and on and on.

And yet even as I write these words I realize that were I to say these things to one of these Believers, I would be inviting a firestorm of argument, with me having to justify, document, explain, defend my own perception of reality.

Which is to say, they have their belief system, I have mine. I can say, of course, that mine is based on demonstrated facts and reality, to which they answer--and so is ours. To them, their facts and reality are every bit as genuine as are mine to me.

This is where the pain comes in, an existential dis-ease that settles in somewhere between my head and my heart, almost with a feeling of something ripped, or torn, with a sense of pressure behind it.

As I stay with it, I can recognize some of the forces that create our various realities. I'm comfortable with mine because I "know" I've pieced it together over a long period of time, skeptically studying, watching, measuring all sources, carefully avoiding following any party line. In my view of reality, those who are now caught up irate with Mr Obama have been callously manipulated in their fears by forces that have other political agendas.

So my view is "correct." But only to me. And reminding myself of exactly why I have this view, the pain begins to subside.

As I continue to delve into this, I must watch this internal process.