Truth has taken a serious beating over the past few years, so much so that it was beginning to feel like we were living in an episode of The Twilight Zone, where up was down, down was up, the sky was yellow, fire was blue — and it seemed like a lot of people had lost the ability to even know the difference.

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Although there has always been an element of dishonesty in politics, many politicians, on every level, had started to go way beyond little white lies told on the campaign trail.  Many of the lies some had started to tell didn’t just target their opponents track record or enhance their own, they targeted reality itself. 

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To make matters far worse, there seemed to be more people than ever before willing to relinquish the power of their paint-by-number belief systems to master manipulators who happily colored in the blanks for them. As a result, truth started to become whatever each person or group of people wanted it to be. Truth was quickly becoming a personal choice instead of a touchstone.

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Thankfully, it feels like the results of the 2022 midterm election clearly showed that many Americans flatly reject this dishonest direction (thank God!).  But still, it also feels like truth is not something we can ever take for granted again.

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Whereas, in the good ‘ol days, when most of us let facts and reality determine our truth, there are now those who work it exactly backward — deciding first what they want the truth to be, then seeking out whatever post, tweet, conspiracy theory, or cable news host confirms it.  This confirmation bias is not hard to find — regardless of how outlandish it may be — because in our daily lives, we absorb a dizzying kaleidoscope of data that bombards us from all directions.

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Overwhelmed by this information onslaught, it’s no wonder most people gravitate toward the sources they are most comfortable with on social media, newspapers, radio, and television — which, through repetition and a total lack of dissent, ultimately combine to create an echo chamber that only amplifies and reenforces the original belief.  Operating in this manner may take less mental energy and its familiarity and consistency may provide temporary comfort, but it only serves to perpetuate our distrust of one another and deepen our political divide. Preaching to the choir takes minimal effort and requires minimal leadership. It’s not courageous, it’s redundant. 

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The good news is that Proverbs 12:19 reminds us that “truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue lasts only a moment.” < You do remember Proverbs, don’t you Christians? >

 

Guys, it is absolutely imperative that we ensure this phenomenon of deception has been nothing more than an unfortunate moment in our history and that the moment has now passed. The future of this country depends on it.

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As a civil society, we have to get back to a place where we can, at a minimum, agree on a basic set of facts.  Whatever we decide to do about that set of facts is an entirely different issue, but we must start from a place of truth.  This was way easier in the good ‘ol days when families would sit together each night and watch Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley and Edward R. Murrow speak the truth, not as they individually viewed it, but as the way it actually was.  People across the United States all heard the same facts. I’m not naïve enough to believe we will ever get back to that exact place, but there are many ways we can recapture its essence.

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Here’s a good place for us to start: To successfully construct a new paradigm, we need to first deconstruct the old one and learn from the lessons it teaches.  

 

Visualize the United States of America as a house. The construction of our house, like all houses, started with the foundation. Our foundation was designed to be eternally rock-solid by brilliant but flawed men in 1787… which is lucky for us because without a strong foundation the stability of our entire house would have been at-risk from the very beginning.

 

The walls of our house were constructed with the durable — and once believed indestructible — planks of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Both our foundation and walls were built from a blueprint that envisioned the strongest, most resilient republic ever conceived.

 

By the beginning of the 20th-century, our house looked pretty awesome! It was bright and shiny, much stronger and more expensive than all the other houses, and, thanks to the wealth brought by oil, steel, and industrial development, our house was carefully maintained. Electrical power provided light for our house; steam engines and railroads became its roadway; and farming, ranching and mining found fertile ground in its backyard.

 

Despite the economic shock of the Great Depression, after World War II our home’s occupants became better educated, gainfully employed and more mobile. Unemployment plummeted, consumer demand exploded, and suburbs flourished. In fact, our house looked so perfect from the outside that very few guessed it was in danger of rotting from within.

 

But unfortunately, that is what gradually started to happen. Political scandals like Watergate and the Iran-Contra Affair — along with the corruption introduced by powerful lobbyists and well-financed special interests — began to erode the public’s trust in its leaders and planted the seeds of disappointment and disrespect toward the White House, Congress, and other government institutions.

 

At the same time, the energy crisis in the 1970s, the savings and loans fiasco, and massive accounting scandals planted the seeds of anger and animosity toward private enterprise, well before the 2007-2009 Financial Crisis solidified the outrage. The subprime bank bailout was particularly hard to swallow because the United States has consistently had the largest wealth divide between the rich and the poor for decades.

 

Moral catastrophes like Vietnam, Guantánamo, the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and Hurricane Katrina called into question our national core values and threatened our global image.

 

Overlaying all of this, the ghosts of our past have been active and destructive for Black Americans. In truth, our house has been haunted for centuries. The scars branded as far back as slavery remain painfully evident for many of these Americans. Generations of pervasive disparity has taken an egregious toll on members of this community, a population uniquely susceptible to the inequitable cycles of preceding generations.

 

Slowly, over time, flagrant self-interest, a stunning lack of empathy, and extreme political divisiveness clawed at our social and political fabric, causing Americans to lose their unity of purpose.

 

It is in this weakened condition that our house now stood. With a damaged foundation and unstable walls, our haunted house was already under the threat of being reduced to kindling — just barely able to hold its own weight.  

 

But then…

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Into this perfect storm walked Donald Trump…holding a match.

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