Truth is a precious and simple thing. It is always there, here, among us, right in front of us but cannot always be seen. The fog and fever of lies can make truth difficult or impossible to perceive.
When we are young, we have an innate inclination or conscience to know that lying is wrong that is reinforced by correction when we are caught in a childhood fib. Some of us learn to lie and love it at an early age in spite of correction.
When someone becomes a liar in order to achieve what he is after, if successful, it’s easy to justify the lie. If caught in a lie, and what was achieved is important enough and not lost because of getting caught, then lying has incentive.
The dictionary definition of mendacity is untruthfulness with invariable references to politics and politicians.
Trump was and still is accused of lying about everything. His lies were counted per speech. More than outright lies they were exaggeration or innuendo delivered in partial sentences conveying something that was intended more than clearly stated. He wanted to impress us and have us think things that he wouldn’t really, clearly say out loud.
And, then there were those lies that he did clearly state out loud when he got carried away with himself. In spite of this and his other shortcomings, many of us supported him because of the things he did. We supported his marvelous accomplishments, his tremendous changes, his perfect achievements, his beautiful corrections to government and the way this country works, but not most of his words. Except, of course, “Making America Great Again.” The nostalgia – where has our America gone.
This current administration was built on the lie of uniting the country, among others. Once in power, the lies keep coming, overwhelmingly.
As we watch the news of what is going on in this country how are we to tell the difference in truth and mendacity? Since the beginning of recorded history philosophers, politicians, and theologians have told us stuff that we have to find out whether it is true or not if we even care. If we care to watch the congressional hearings or the president’s speeches, at this point we cannot rely even on the fact-checkers.
As we watch them lie to us, we realize that they think we are believing them.
If you have read this far you are probably paying attention to the news of the unimaginable events that are going on in this country. Truth is the reality of what has happened, the reality of the way things really are, the real world we know from all our human senses (pay attention, I will not repeat my redundancies).
Truth is as basic as Kipling saying, “…water will certainly wet us as fire will certainly burn.” Many things we don’t know enough about to know what the truth is. But, as more information comes to light we can tell the truth from our own innate intuition, from our own observations, and mostly from our own common sense. However, more and more, we are seeing news that is so outlandish, so unbelievable, so outrageous and so un-American it could shake our faith in our own intuition and common sense to allow us to believe it is happening right here at home. Makes us wonder why anyone would want to fundamentally change the greatness of America. May God help us, everyone, to save America in truth.
The views of commentary, opinion, and letters to the editor are those of the author and do not reflect the views of The Fallon Post.
Comment
Comments