What Next?

Out of a party game called “Truth or Dare” (which is still being played), there somehow evolved, way back in the 1940s, a very popular radio program called Truth or Consequences. This weekly feature was heard nationwide. I myself – then a child – listened to it regularly. The program used various gimmicks to increase its popularity, and, one season, it offered to broadcast, live, one night, from the first town which would permanently change its own name to the name of the program.

The winner of this “contest” was a small town in New Mexico then called Hot Springs. All went as planned, and the promised broadcast took place in January 1950. Today, the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico (in everyday usage, commonly abbreviated to “T or C”), is a thriving community. It’s on all the maps and has a population of about 6,000.

But consequences in general, since the word simply means results or effects, can come in a wide range of flavors. The word is related to others like sequence or sequel, which all have to do with following. We are accustomed to certain things following each other in what seems to be certain inevitable order, as it seems (although just how and by whom this order was established is not always easy to establish). Obvious examples are: the days of the week; the months of the year; the numerals from 0 to 9; the letters of the alphabet; degrees of temperature; or just the pages in a book. Others seem even more deeply rooted in reality – the colors of the rainbow; the order of the planets in our solar system; the Table of Elements; the musical notes in the scale; the phases of the Moon. You look at one point in any of these, and you know what is going to follow – or, shall we say, what comes next.

And of course, there is always chronological order – how things happened in time. This is a matter of dates – but the assigning of dates is purely a cultural phenomenon. As you know, various cultures maintain their own calendars. But, regardless of dating systems, the order of events is, or should be, still the same. Yes, but what is to be considered Year Zero? It’s very important, but it has to be set somewhat arbitrarily. Our own “Gregorian” version stems from the early days of Christianity, and takes the supposed date of the birth of Jesus as its starting point, giving us the following years as “A.D.,” and those preceding as “B.C.”

The trouble with that system is that, except for the past two millennia, everything that ever happened was B.C., and the year has to be accompanied, so to speak, by a minus sign. To make matters worse, all those years have to be counted backwards – so that, for example, the lifetime of Julius Caesar was from 100 B.C. to 44 B.C.

The Muslim version takes a significant event in the life of Muhammed for its start. The Hebrews have it all spelled out in the Book of Genesis and need only calculate their days from the Creation of the World. (Their current calendar is in the 5000s.) Then, of course, we can listen to the astronomers and physicists, according to whom the whole Universe is about 15 billion years old, give or take a few billion.

But, no matter what system prevails, the sequence must always be the same. Nevertheless, the word “consequence” has come to have generally negative implications. And with good reason. History and legend are full of stories of people miscalculating, or failing to consider at all, the consequences of their actions. Two classic examples are the invasions of Russia, first by Napoleon, then, 130 years later, by Hitler. Or go back to Aesop and his story in which the Grasshopper takes it easy during the summer, while the Ants are busy laying up supplies for winter. The Big Guy has failed to foresee the consequences of his neglect.

In our culture, the word “next” evokes thoughts of standing in line or sitting in a waiting room. And of course, whatever is “next door” follows on, in actual or metaphorical location, from wherever you are. But whatever is “next best” also follows, but is always behind, and considered not as good as, the very best.

Summing it all up, the problem is for our actions always to lead to wanted, but never to unwanted, Consequences. And that is the Truth.