Fact or Fiction?

Maybe I have been around too long--after all I am past 50-- but there was a time when "fake news" was not a common phrase and the demarkation between truth and falsehood was pretty clear for most of us. Today, in our hyper political world, Truth is whatever we decide it is. Everyone has their own version of the Truth, colored by our experiences, our political leanings, our vested interests, our biases, our emotions, our sense of survival, our selective perception. And it is that selective filter, when confronted with the stark facts such as a recording or a video or a face to face conversation, that filter will cause us to twist and manipulate what we just observed, heard or read into our own version of the truth. And we label anyone who doesn't buy into our Truth as ignorant, naive, our enemy, or worse the purveyor of fake news or falsehood because after all we have Truth on our side.

The problem is that when Truth becomes whatever we deem it to be, then we as individuals, as groups and as a society lose our philosophical foundation and our ethical authority and moral compass. Everything is up for grabs, for interpretation, it becomes spin. Pretty soon we lose our sense of identity, we struggle to hold on to a belief system that should be the bedrock upon which we live and grow. Pretty soon we equivocate, we fail to follow our conviction, we become like the butterfly in a storm-- pulled in various directions depending on the strongest flow. We justify, explain, excuse our actions and comments, we qualify, we reinterpret, we double down embarrassed by our words or actions. We challenge those who question our Truth, we vilify them, we threaten, we disparage, we label them as our enemies. We disappear in quicksand of our own making all the while comfortable in the knowledge that we are on the side of Truth. When one man's Truth becomes the only Truth, it becomes a weapon in the hands of those who seek unlimited power.

Those who scoff at this notion would do well to read up on our history. Dictatorships, be they secular or religious, from the earliest times in history have controlled the general populace by Truth as handed down by the leadership. Those who objected, who challenged were label ed as enemies of the State, of God, of the common good. Think of the Roman Emperors, the Crusades, the long line of kings and queens, of Hitler, Stalin, McCarthy, Mussolini, Putin, the list goes own. Each had their brand of Truth and the populace either embraced it and lived or they challenged it and died.

So here we are in 2018. We reside in a nation founded on the principles of Freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom from persecution, and the like. We are the beneficiaries of one of our most sacred documents, the Declaration of Independence which begins with the words "We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal,.......... " But today we have a leader who believes in his own brand of Truth above all others, a leader who vilifies those who speak other than his truth as liars, as enemies of the People. He is supported by politicians of like party if not like minds who are unwilling to question or challenge, gripped by the fear that if they were to oppose the Leader's form of Truth they would lose their own feeble grip on the power they think they hold and do not want to relinquish. And what about you and I. Most of us pick one Truth or the other, failing to consider what our founding Fathers so eloquently expressed at their own great peril. It is the same Truth that resulted in Fathers and Sons of every generation since the birth of this nation in laying down their lives in the ultimate sacrifice to protect our right to speak the Truth. So the question is can we do any less. Are we willing to follow one man's Truth or will we stand by those self evident Truths which so many have died for ? How each one of us answers that question will in large measure determine the future of this nation.