0528blog
Quest For Truth
I totally support President Biden’s support for an examination and investigation into the source of COVID-19 in China and I totally support judicial investigations into trump and trump’s companies and trump’s cronies and I totally support the investigations into rudy giuliani’s lame brained, half-baked efforts to smear Biden and I totally support further investigations into Russian attempts to spread lies through giuliani. And there is absolutely no doubt that it is critical to the future of the country that all the facts come out about the deadly, bloody, violent, sloppy, inept attempts to overthrow the government on Jan. 6.
In saner times, these efforts for answers would be applauded but these are not saner times.
If the probe shows that the pandemic was spread by bats and was not part of a Chinese conspiracy spawned in their laboratory, if that is what is determined, millions of people will reject the findings because they don’t fit their reality as created through the trump years. If investigations into giuliani result in his indictment and conviction, millions will see it as a political railroading aimed at derailing trump’s reelection chances and the same goes for the attempts to unravel Russian manipulation in the election. If a bi-partisan review of the attempted insurrection at the capitol show that trump’s actions were tantamount to ordering the assault, if it shows that other officials were intimately and criminally involved in planning the attack, none of it will matter to so many millions of people who have lost their balance along with any scintilla of trust in getting straight answers from the leaders.
So while we’re at it, let’s reopen the investigation into the JFK assassination because everybody knows it was a conspiracy that’s been kept quiet for 58 years and I totally support releasing all the government knows about UFOs because it’s obvious that there have been real UFOs in our skies for many, many years and I totally support investigations into whether the earth is round or flat and I we must re-opening the Benghazi investigations because everybody knows that Hillary Clinton was to blame and I totally support an in-depth review of the nation’s voting system so we can unearth widespread voter fraud. No I don’t really call for these subjects to be reviewed but be sure that millions of people would very much like answers that would fit their biases.
And after we get the answers, so what, as we will be in the same place as we were before the investigations and this is yet, another intended consequence and crime of the trump years, the crime of blithely and even joyfully, polluting the minds of Americans with so many lies to the point that nobody trusts the government to be truthful and instead, why wouldn’t people take a deep dive to find the answers that fit their beliefs and that is why the internet is there, to spawn those repositories of fantastic conspiracies like QAnon. We have been damaged like the victim of a sexual assault and the effect is that we can never trust another soul, and we may not even be aware of the trauma that has been caused, and that is part of the damages and part of the epitaph of the years of trump.
People want truth desperately but they have lost the ability to see through the fog and differentiate between mirages and reality and this is yet another part of the fallout from trump, something that was altogether intentional and is yet another tool of all authoritarians. I don’t know if we will ever recover, I hope so, because without truth there is no reality and no morality and when people lose all faith in truth, they can be manipulated and twisted and tattered and torn.
If you think many of us have become dogmatic, skeptics, jaded, cynical, mistrusting, surfeited with all the corrosive lies and downright wasted, you are so right. So what is to be done? When so many people have given up any hope of truth, when truth becomes just another political weapon, what is to be done? So many people have lost confidence that truth can ever be anything more than opinions, that truth has no real value other than how it can be weaponized and people blithely accept it, unaware of the cumulative effects of the poison. I still cling desperately to a belief that people really do want to do the right thing but are so desperate that they were willing to enter a state of denial because any other reaction would be hopeless. I fear that as people are willingly misled and become more polarized they will find it easier to commit more personal affronts against those with whom they disagree, like spreading COVID-19 because of a refusal to wear a mask.
Greg Koukl and Francis J. Beckwith say in their book, “Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air” that “when truth dies, all of its subspecies, such as ethics, perish with it. If truth can’t be known, then the concept of moral truth becomes incoherent. Ethics become relative, right and wrong matters of individual opinion. This may seem a moral liberty, but it ultimately rings hollow. ‘The freedom of our day,’ lamented a graduate in a Harvard commencement address, ‘is the freedom to devote ourselves to any values we please, on the mere condition that we do not believe them to be true.’
“The death of truth in our society has created a moral decay in which ‘every debate ends with the barroom question ‘says who?’ When we abandon the idea that one set of laws applies to every human being, all that remains is subjective, personal opinion.”
The logo for the Washington Post is “Democracy dies in the darkness” and it’s getting very dark out there although it’s not night, yet.