It All Comes Out In The Wash

By Natalie Shobana Ambrose
theSun, Malaysia
July 29, 2010

There were only enough clothes to do one load and I didn’t have the luxury of separating my colours and whites. Worried that this colour mix was going to cause a repeat of the many laundry deaths of my white items, I decided to invest in a box of colour catchers. These little felt-like sheets came with big promises to prevent colour runs and staining while mine also came with the endorsement of a friend.

Dumped in the laundry, put the colour catcher in the machine and hoped for the best while waiting for my clothes to come out smelling like a field of lavender minus the fertilizer.

The colour-catcher did “catch” some colour as it wasn’t its white self anymore but neither were my whites!

Another sad, pitiful and unnecessary death of a beautiful crisp white top and patches of pink styled some of my other clothes, what a tragedy it was.

It reminded me of a phrase a friend of mine recently used as we tried to piece together bits of conflicting information about a situation. It wasn’t a murder mystery but still it was important enough for us to want to solve.

After we kept hitting a wall, failing miserably in a huff of defeat he said ‘Well, it will all come out in the wash.” True enough it did! It took a while but the truth was revealed.

Have you noticed that when you try to cover up something it almost never stays covered up? One lie is neveenough for a full cover up and then by the time you’ve fibbed a few too many, it’s hard to keep up.

Recently Wikileaks a whistle blower website claimed that there is evidence of war crimes in US military reports of Afghanistan. Pakistan objects to the insinuation that it is playing double agent between the US and the Taliban, whilst Afghanistan is shocked by it all, as the rest debunk the accusations as false. Wikileaks however claims to have documented evidence.

I guess it could go two ways, either it is hushed down like most high profile cases in Malaysia and the public are given the run around with no answers or the war crimes tribunal might decide to take these allegations seriously and start charging the guilty as they have done with Pol Pots regime.

Just years before, going against the Khmer Rouge would have cost you your life and standing up or talking about the cruelty would have been out of the question. Their leaders were too powerful, untouchable and off limits. But where are they now?

Years later, the truth has caught up with them. If anything history has proven over and again that cover ups get revealed because too many lies have gone before and it’s pretty hard to keep up with them. One cannot continuously cover-up or camouflage the truth because eventually, the truth reveals itself for it is humanly impossible to keep up with even one lie.

Many organisations and governments of the past have been under the assumption that the public need not know about everything because the public get terribly confused with to much information. It’s somewhat like a parent saying, “I’ll tell you when you’re older” and the kid finds out from someone else.

There are many injustices in our very on country that for now we aren’t allowed to speak about, many accusations that are not investigated because it involves those who are too powerful and many conflicting pieces of evidence that make it hard to piece together an accurate conclusion to high profile cases especially when key witnesses are in far away lands.

However just like Cambodia under the rule of the Khmer Rouge, people were probably silenced and not allowed to talk, question or write about things deemed sensitive because it involved the powerful untouchables. Only years later, the very subject is not off limits and neither are the powerful generals of the past.

We live in a time where there is too much dishonesty, silencing and corruption; when standing upright means rebelling. But I still believe that one day it will all come out in the wash.

Natalie is of the opinion that laundry does tell a tale on you.
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