Lies and the Internet - Who to Believe

Why is the Truth nowhere to be found ?

      It seems so hard to get to what is real in our world today.   There are so many sources of information and we are never sure what the hidden agenda is or might be of the particular site we are on.
      How can we get to the real bedrock of truth and avoid lies and mis-truths?
How can we decide who to believe?

     Well, first we look to people and organizations who already have a good reputation, a reputation of some degree of objectivity.   That is pretty hard to find.   We judge often by how much we feel the person agrees with us.
So we must ask ourselves first if we are prejudiced.   But none of us wants to admit the possibility that "we" are prejudiced.

     In the end it depends a lot on how opinionated we are or on what particular ax we have to grind.   And we have to admit Everyone has an ax to grind and no one is without prejudice.  There is no such thing as total objectivity.   We are all just humans who do not possess omnipotence.

     If you tend to be more conservative, you trust other conservatives more.   If you are more liberal, you tend to trust the folks who describe themselves as liberal.   But in the final analysis, you can find truth on both sides of the political 
spectrum.
     My personal opinion is that God is the only source of ultimate truth and all of us see the little piece that is closest to us.   For non-believers in a deity, my atheist brothers and sisters, some of you also see great truths about our human situation.  But I would probably have many differences in how each of us see life here on this third rock from the Sun.

     All that being said, each person must arrive at some sort of equation or procedure to use to determine who is lying or has questionable motives.
People talk about due diligence, but even accessing a broad range of information often leaves us puzzled.
     In addition, we have to admit to several wild cards.   For one thing, the internet is full of websites which are anonymous, un-ascribed, and undated, with no easy way to 'vett' the source.   Actually like a site like this one.
 
     You have no way of really knowing who I am.   I could be a Russian hacker or an agent of a foreign land.  I have tried to describe where I am coming from and to be open about my own motives, but you will have to be the judge of that.
 
     But we all should acknowledge for every person trying to express their particular version of the 'Truth", there are 10 or 100 who are not really trying to be honest.   Also, there are active dis-information websites run by foreign powers like Russia and others.   They take a seed of truth and then wrap it up in their particular propaganda to spin the info to serve themselves.
     Then there are unscrupulous website owners who really do not care what the truth is. They are the "Click-baiting" sites.    They take whatever headline is trending, and then they sensationalize it to get your attention, (because we are all attracted to the most outrageous news),  and they make their money with ads and other selling, because they have traffic to their site.
     Even if you do a diligent search for more information to substantiate what you just read or seen, you will encounter tons of conflicting data.  So in the end, you are thrown back onto your own resources and your own best guesstimate.
Welcome to the world we humans in all our infinite wisdom have created.


   My best suggestion is to read everything you can, survey and surf widely, and after you have gathered a fair amount of data, from a broad variety of sources, then make up your own mind.  I guess that is the way it has always been.   It helps if you have a foundation of truth to stand on.  You have to start somewhere.   Most of us find the baseline of truth in religion, but you may also find value in scientific and empirical data.   I wish you all luck and hope that what you decide on contains some compassion for us humans and for all life on the planet.

A Patriot's Faith in the United States of America and Why we are Great

A Patriot's Faith in the United States of America and Why we are Great

    I love the United States of America.  That means different things to different
people.  Because in this place in the World,
our Differences are Celebrated.

We tolerate a lot.  We even tolerate atheists.  We hope they come to faith in God,
because that is what the United States is about, at least to some extent.
Many came here seeking religious freedom, but also political freedom.
Freedom to work, and freedom to move about the cabin at will.

Your own free will and your own personal relationship with God are what we value.   What an individual regards as holy is valued in the United States of America.  And people love it here because you are permitted to go to whatever church you like or no church at all.  Toleration is our Creed.  And no one can presume to stand between you and what you regard as True or Holy.



Now the bad stuff.  We are a political experiment.  We have done some evil on the way to where we are.  A lot.   We have some 'Splain'in to do. We have a lot of things we need to clean up.
But we have also done good.  We stood against fascism and despotism when we helped defeat the Nazi madness which seized part of the world for awhile.

And after that conflict, when we possessed the pre-eminent power of nuclear weapons, and could have dictated to the world that they must all be under our specific control, we did not seek world hegemony, but rather, tried to influence all nations to embrace a system of democratic rule.  Unfortunately, most of the world was just shaking off the bonds of colonialism and many were not ready for our particular style and flavor of a free-wheeling democratic republic.



As I say, I love the United States of America.   I love it because it is my home, my mother and father lived here, and brought me up here, and the Americans I know are some of the finest, nicest people you could ever meet in the world.

And we are generous and naive to a fault. Many of us tend to believe what people tell us.  WE trust people.  We trust people to do what they say they Will do, and to have a moral code of honor.  Because that is how we are.  And we expect others to also be moral.  Because it is the right way to be.
          Doesn't everyone know that?

But there is more depth below the surface and still waters run deep.

Where can I start?  Americans are relentlessly optimistic.  Oh, we can be pragmatic and dour, but most progress comes from foolishly hopeful people with  an idea or dream which may not entirely be rooted in reality.

In other words, we are a nation of Dreamers and Risk-takers in many ways.

We self-selected out when we came here from other lands.  Those of us who voluntarily came here, that is.
Many came here looking for a sense of community and searched for the perfect community here.  So that is a lot of dreams and a lot of dreamers right there, especially because we know there is no Perfect in man's world.

We like to think about the Pilgrims, as our first Americans, but perhaps they are not the most accurate example.
 I would like to talk about what a Real American is, but not just yet.

I would like to acknowledge the good and to admit the bad and get everything out on the table.  As long as we leave anything buried beneath our fears, it will fester and rot and continue to infect us.

Only when we look at ourselves soberly, with some degree of balance and honesty, and allow ourselves to see and to accept everything, will we have any hope of having a community and a more perfect Union.

On Racism in America– Where we have come from

On Racism in America– Where we have come from   -Sept 30, 2016

( I cannot believe it's 60 years since the 1950's and we are still dealing with this)

I had a head-start liking black people. Not that I knew anyone black growing up.

There was one black kid in my high school; the exchange student from Uganda. And I would see an older black woman waiting at a bus stop from time to time, and somehow I understood, she was a cleaning lady for some white family. No, I didn't get my head-start in high school. I got my head-start from my father's jazz record collection. My Father loved Satchmo, the master, Louis Armstrong, also known as, “Pops”.

From wikipedia- “Armstrong was one of the first truly popular African-American entertainers to "cross over", whose skin color was secondary to his music in an America that was extremely racially divided. He rarely publicly politicized his race, often to the dismay of fellow African-Americans, but took a well-publicized stand for desegregation in the Little Rock Crisis. His artistry and personality allowed him socially acceptable access to the upper echelons of American society which were highly restricted for black men of his era.”

I, myself, did not adequately appreciate Mr. Armstrong. But there were many others in my father's collection that I enjoyed more.

As a boy, I remember a road trip we took to Florida. I still remember going to some run-down, dirty, “filling stations” for gas in the South and seeing a sign on the rest room door, “Whites Only”. That would have been in the late fifties. I was maybe ten years old.

I also saw very slender, meagerly dressed, black folk in the cotton-fields of the South working under the sun in the fields, and some of the shacks that they may have worked and lived out of. A very different time in America. And not one I am proud to report.

I merely state it as the time I came out of.

     By the beginning of the sixties, I had started my own record collection, with some very prized jazz and old blues records. I had also started reading a series of books which were pivotal in my belated education, for I certainly did not get much, if any, useful information from school. I read “Black Like Me”, by Griffin, a white reporter who dyed his skin black, and traveled through the South, and reported his experience.

I remember books by Dick Gregory describing his feelings and thoughts; “From the back of the Bus” and “Nigger-an auto-biography”. Eldridge Cleaver's, “Soul on Ice” made quite an impact on me. There were also others; “Man-child in the Promised Land” by Claude Brown, “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, and “Go Tell It On The Mountain” by James Baldwin.

     All this is to say, by 1969, I was quite ready for Richie Havens opening the show at Woodstock and I remember his set since I happened to be there, somewhat by coincidence.

     I was about 19 at that time and still did not know my ass from a hole in the ground. The fact that Richie was the only one ready to go on and that he carried the whole weight of the entire event on his shoulders, and they kept sending him back out to keep playing, because they did not have anyone else to put on, still brings tears to my eyes, as I think of what a pure spirit he was and what a gift of his beautiful soul he gave us that night. 

      During that golden time in history when we somehow thought we had vanquished, or at least had met the monster of segregation and racism, and had the beginning of a solution, we deluded ourselves that we ourselves were not racist. But of course, we were young and did not realize how deep were planted the seeds of our fears and all the subtle ways we all participated in the collective choice of society to defend the elevated position of white privilege. That understanding would take many more decades to begin to explore.

      But the upside was that we had opened a door and we were able to enjoy James Brown, Jimmy Preston, Sly Stone, ( especially Sly Stone who brought the whole situation together under one exulted vision ), Stevie Wonder, and the whole galaxy of black humans who shared their special appreciation for the miracle of life.

      And the special tragedy now, even after electing a black president who has been vilified by a sizeable number of Americans, even after all the beauty black men and black women have shared with America and the world, we are still embroiled in the same fear of losing our own sense of specialness as unique humans.    So we all have some “splain-ing” to do, as Desi Arnaz used to say to Lucille Ball.    We have work to do to see ourselves as one human race, equally precious and valuable in God's eyes.    Maybe if we try to see it from God's eyes instead of our own, we will be further along.