If you ever read the novel or saw the movie “Lord of the Flies” you’d be right to conclude that people left without a “veneer of civilization” are mean-spirited, cruel and even hateful unto murder. In that story, a group of English school boys find themselves stranded on an island. After a short time, they resort to humiliation, abuse and violence against one another. Three are killed. The horror seems about to climax when they are rescued by “civilization.” The irony is that the rescuers are sailors from a naval vessel, among the most dangerous creations of mankind.

I remember going to the library on “Owl’s Day.” This is the well-known yearly event where I can go into the library, perch at one of the cubicles, and read. Most of us who’ve read that blood-curdling story remember it. It influenced our way of thinking, if not our very lives. We became wary, and less trustful of one another. Powerful though that story was, we need to ask, “Was it true?” We spend a lot of time worrying. We worry that “kids these days” won’t behave, will not have as much as we did or have it too easy, that they don’t have good old-fashioned values, or any values or aren’t good. Our standard is always what we know, or believe to be true.

Yet, often we are wrong. Kids sometimes surprise us with their kindness, their empathy for others and knowledge of things we wish we’d known. As a kid, I would not read a single thing about the world. For me, the world was baseball; the most I ever read was the sports page. But someone changed my mind, and so changed me. I have a librarian to thank for that, because she told me, when I refused to read, that there were “baseball books” too. Really? I responded, with a twinkle in my eye. I’d found what I could do when it rained! Soon, I discovered other stories — other books. I became a real night owl, reading all sorts of good sports stories, then later whole books. My world was changing.

We need not fear looking “around the corner.” If we only stay with what we know growing up, what a narrow world we’ve locked ourselves into. As was once said, “A man who cannot read is no poorer than a man who can, but won’t, read.” Every Limestone high school student will leave our little county someday. Unlike in years gone by, today the students “leave” every day on the Internet. They’ll meet different people, of different world views, and differing opinions. What we can offer them is how to critically assess what they hear and to judge whether what they hear is true, false or somewhere in between.

Everyone is on some sort of journey, and everyone has his own demons to deal with. A kid who only knows his farm, or his street, is not to be avoided. He can be befriended. When we make an acquaintance, we should try to hear “where they are coming from.” Why? Why not? Everyone has a story. Everyone can share something, and we can be the wiser having heard it. Or we can be the wiser because we heard it and didn’t accept it. In both cases, we learned something after having thought about and inquiring further, whether it was true or not. Too bad we don’t expect a minimum of factual honesty from some politicians. We let a politician recite slogans and consider him a regular Socrates. We need to be unafraid to ask questions in life, to dig until we find the truth. We need to think critically.

And so, we asked, was the philosophy of “The Lord of the Flies” true? A researcher, Rutger Bregman, writing in a national magazine, published an astounding story. A true event happened in 1966. Six high school aged boys from a South Pacific Catholic school were shipwrecked on a tiny Tongan island. Alone for 15 months, they survived. They did so through simple rules: to have fun, survive and make smoke signals for passing ships. They promised never to quarrel. If any did, they were separated to opposite ends of the island for up to four hours until they cooled off.

When found, they were healthy, in good spirits and remained friends the rest of their lives. So, to answer the question of whether “Lord of the Flies” is true, we can perhaps intuit an answer. The man who found the real shipwrecked boys and became their boon companion through life, said it best at age 90.

“Life has taught me a great deal, including the lesson that you should always look for what is good and positive in people.”