The Death of Truth

The backbone of American morality has disappeared and truth is dead in this country.  It has been a slow and painful death but most of the death throws occur out of the public sight, occasionally bursting into the headlines and causing people to notice.   It has been a slow poisoning that began in courtrooms and spread to the halls of Congress.  From there it took hold in state government and then the poison leaked into the schools and the minds of those that will succeed us in this country.

Why do I say this?  I'll tell you why.  I hear it every day, I see it and I feel it.  There have been studies done lately that demonstrate that people, in a normal conversation of a few minutes, will lie or distort repeatedly.  Why is this important, why don't you just let people sort it out and find out what's true and what isn't?  Because they cannot.  Where would they turn to find the truth, the media?  The poisoning has occurred there too and it has caused major damage and polarization in this country.  The average Joe can no longer trust what the see or hear on NBC, NPR or Fox News because of something called "spin".  The word spin has taken on a new meaning.  You can define it as the process of justifying a position from information you know to be distorted, incomplete or patently false.  But "spin" is a way of sugar coating a lie.  Spin makes a position seem reasonable and therefore can be the basis for more lies, heaped upon lies, that may eventually become a "truth".  We've all heard the axiom about how if you say something enough, even if it is a lie, people will eventually take it to be true.  That is what is happening in this country every day in politics and the courtroom.

What constantly focuses me on this issue is watching the behavior of the far Left.  If you put a liberal in a closed room with Sean Hannity for a year, then let them out, there will still be a conservative and a liberal leave the room.  The hard core Lefties and Righties have their own versions of "truth" that are really irreconcilable.  But how does one find truth then?  Hey Bock, it's OK for you to put this stuff up on the blog, but carry it through won't you?  I'll try by saying that it requires energy and and a classical scientific approach.  Finding facts, analyzing data and watching trends.  Most important, one must try to figure out if non factual elements drive your opinion of what is true.  That is, do emotions make things "true" for you?  For instance, is universal health care a god given right?  A liberal would say yes, and a conservative would say no.  Unabashedly I would say there is far more factual information to prove the conservative right, but that will never satisfy the liberal who "feels" healthcare is an individual right.

I think we as a society are in real trouble when we begin to accept things we "feel" as truths.  It is living in a virtual world.  Barack Obama has been accused of this and you can see it in his infantile foreign policy.  What really gauls me is that a large portion of American society accepts people like Obama and even elevate them to the status of popular heroes.  Take John Edwards, who came ever so close to the White House.  He has lied through his teeth about his infidelities for ages, only to admit them in public when forced by the truth.  Then there is the Grand Master, Bill Clinton, who introduced us to "what is, is" and caused us to look a little differently at cigars than we did before.  With moral rules like Clinton's anyone can sleep well at night.  The fact that these two schmoes can become leaders to a large part of society is atrocious.  It demonstrates quite clearly how Americans have lost their moral compass and a respect for the truth.  Truth has become a relative thing and is no longer an absolute.  Without the backbone of truth, we are greatly diminished society.

In the end, I think I will just take the advice of Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane in their song. Somebody to Love:

When the truth is found
To be lies
And all joy within you dies
Don't you want somebody to love
Don't you need somebody to love
Wouldn't you love somebody to love
You better find somebody to love

Love a conservative who gets things Right.