The Truth

Truth- that which is in accordance with fact or reality

In the house I was raised in truth was unequivocal. It was not something that there was room to argue about, there was no wiggle room around truth. You either told the truth to my father or paid the consequences. It was one of his hard and fast rules that formed the foundation or our relationship with him. With truth came trust and acceptance in his company, anything else was simply unacceptable. I don't remember my first exposure to this rule of law but I do remember that it was universally applied. If we got in trouble for something he would ask us what we had done. Woe be unto whomever strayed from the truth when this question was asked. I learned very early that his wrath for doing the wrong thing was inconsequential compared with his wrath for not telling the truth about it later. Even though his wrath could be severe, it wasn't so much his wrath that I was afraid of as it was the loss of his respect. Respect was hard earned from my dad but it was also more valuable in his estimation than anything else he gave us and we all realized this at a young age and valued it accordingly.

I have carried that respect for truth throughout my life. I don't mind a good story now and then, and good stories are often flavored with what we want to remember just as much as they are with what actually happened but when it comes to human interaction and the serious business of work, truth is absolutely necessary if we are to achieve anything in this world. We simply can't learn lessons about anything unless we learn to respect the truth first. Everyone makes mistakes and I believe we actually learn more from our mistakes than our successes. However, it becomes impossible to learn anything from our mistakes if we refuse to acknowledge them. We are simply doomed to repeat them endlessly at that point, never advancing beyond them because we don't understand they are mistakes.

The current presidential election has presented us with two candidates who have no respect at all for the truth. Trump is a serial liar of enormous magnitude. He regularly denies saying or doing things that he has been publicly recorded saying and doing. I have known people like Trump before, habitual liars are not a new invention of this political campaign, they have been with us for a long time. Trump seems to be the most obvious of this particular characteristic that we have had run for president but he is not the first liar we have had run for this or any other office. Politicians who say one thing and then do something else are quite common. The artful use of language to give the implication of one intent while doing something completely opposed to this intention seems to be part of holding public office for a lot of people.

Trump takes his dishonesty to levels that we haven't seen in someone running for president. The airwaves are literally full of overlays of him first saying something and then blatantly denying having ever said it. He has a childish tendency to simply deny his own statements endlessly even when confronted with the proof of him saying it. It is quite remarkable to see actually. I am reminded of a conversation I had with one of my sister-in-laws concerning her child's refusal to admit he had done wrong. I told her he must be forced to admit the truth before he would ever become capable of being trustworthy. Evidently, Trump has never been forced to be truthful which leads to the fact that he is bascially unworthy of anyone's trust as the multitude of lawsuits he has been involved in are open testament to.

Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton also seems to have little or no respect for the truth. Her career is full of half truths, tortured attempts at equivocation and twisted logic to justify actions that may have been honest mistakes at the time but now are seen as political baggage and disavowed accordingly. She seems incapable of simply admitting that she made a mistake and moving on. Every change of position, every twisting of statements by others to point them towards meanings that they did not have all add up to someone who has no basic respect for the truth. The truth is that opinions evolve, people change and political positions evolve as well. Unfortunately, very few politicians have the temerity to point this out when their positions evolve.

The Clinton's have a very long history in US politics. It would be impossible for them to hold the same positions they did in 1980 and still be electable in 2016 because the US voting population has evolved dramatically since that time. I would have more respect for Hillary Clinton if she were to point this out and admit that neither she nor her husband are infallible. Unfortunately, as we saw in the Lewinsky case, Bill Clinton has no real respect for the truth either.

I suspect we all know habitual liars. It is a fact of life that we will be confronted with them at work, in our personal lives, and at various social functions. I try to avoid them as much as possible. I simply have no respect or use for them. No one is perfect and we all suffer from various personal weaknesses and flaws but someone who has no respect for the truth has an extremely low value as a human in my estimation for the simple reason that they are permanently frozen in a state of perpetual childish tendencies that they have no hope of advancing past because they have no understanding that they should. Habitual liars never admit or their own mistakes, therefore they never understand them.

It disheartens me to think that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the only two real choices we have running for the highest office in the land this year. One of them is provably a habitual liar of monumental proportions. The other has shown a very haughty and public disdain for the truth on numerous occasions. Quite honestly, neither of them would be a guest I would choose to entertain in my home, much less someone I would choose to run the most powerful nation on earth.