The Lies We Tolerate

 

The Lies We Tolerate

There is an innate characteristic found in practically everyone on the planet that values honesty and truth and abhors untruths, misinformation, ignorance and especially outright willful lying. As children we often got into trouble because we lied and got caught in it. (In fact, one of the worst things that can happen to us as children is to lie and NOT get caught.) We were set straight in one fashion or another, but in all instances, I would venture to say, we were told that lying is wrong, even sinful, or some other descriptive word was used to get the point across.

I can’t imagine any good parent telling a child that lying is acceptable and that they should strive to become better liars. We spend our entire lives understanding that principle and generally we seek to live up to it, though we often fail in the growth process.

There is a reason why there are no “truth detecting” machines but there are lie detectors. Lie detectors work because even our bodies react to the telling of lies. Telling the truth doesn’t sway the needle, but a lie, unless we become very proficient at the art of lying, always moves the needle. Telling the truth is in harmony with our physical existence. Lying is contrary to it.

I would say that no one tells a lie without a little alarm going off in their brains saying, “That’s not true. Why are you saying that?” After years of ignoring that inner alarm, it becomes merely a faint beep or nonexistent at all.

I am not talking about speaking when you do not know enough of the subject to make a true statement concerning it or when you misunderstand an issue and make a wrong assumption based on not having enough facts. I am speaking of outright lies that you know are lies when you begin to move your lips.

So that brings me to a bold conclusion and a question: How has the Democrat Party become so proficient at telling lies and misleading the American people that they do it with a straight face? How do they ignore that inherently human characteristic which makes them aware that they are about to utter a falsehood? Or do they know it, as every human being does, and they just do not care?

Every interaction that we undertake as human beings in any relationship whether personal, business, family, social, financial, or whatever type of relationship it is, we demand it be based and grounded on honesty and truthfulness. Anything we endeavor to do based on anything else is doomed to fail.

We refuse to accept lies about our money for our banker. We refuse to accept lies from our spouse. We want the true story from our doctor even if unpleasant. So why are we so naïve as to accept them from a politician without question or accountability? We know at the deepest level that lies are counterproductive if not destructive and yet we hear them from politicians daily and shrug them off. We abhor lying and have even made it a crime to do so in a court of law, yet we tolerate lies from our leaders. Why?

If politicians can lie to our faces with a straight face, knowing that they are lying all the while, they cannot be trusted to rule any part of our lives. They have not yet mastered the basic fundamental act of being truthful to themselves, so how can we trust them to be truthful with us or to us? Simple. We can’t.

Democrats have lied about the border, elections, the economy, social issues, capitalism, socialism, the state of the country, climate issues and everything else they talk about, and they pretend to tell us what is good for us, from what we should be saying to what we should be eating.

That inner voice that tells them to not lie and to be truthful, that simple act of honesty they should have learned at 5 years old, escapes them. They lie with impunity and without accountability. They lie to advance perverted agendas and they have no remorse, even when they are rarely called on it. When accountability is removed, the immoral individuals, guided by agendas and ideology, see no boundaries and they run wild.

When one does evil, knowing it is evil, and then continue to do evil, they have indeed become evil themselves. There is no other explanation nor is there another excuse for their behavior. With no conscience to guide them, they wreak havoc at every turn, and they sleep like babies at night any way.

The simple fact is that in all our relationships and dealings, in all of life’s situations, truth must be of paramount importance, and anyone who operates otherwise, deserves no position of power over us. It is time that truth replace dishonesty, deception and outright lies in all levels of our lives, and that means government and the press too. We are willfully being led down a rocky road that coming back from will soon be impossible. If there ever was a reason to resist the corruption of government, at local, state and federal levels, it is now.

America was founded as a stand against tyranny, and it may be time for a refresher course in what sacrifices and commitment that requires of us, or we will sadly bring this grand experiment of a Republic to a close.

A Method to the Madness

I understand that many try and steer away from politics because it tends to be a volatile issue. But with the screwy things that are happening in America today, it is time to take a stand.

We are seeing the Left getting student-aged millennials and young people fired up about the “evils” of the Confederacy, the historical importance notwithstanding. So, the destruction or removal of statues of Confederate soldiers and leaders was guaranteed to follow.

The Confederate Flag has always been a popular target but has grown even more so as of late. Even the state of Mississippi is under fire because a corner of their state flag displays a small version of that flag.

But the drive for “ending racism” did not stop there. Statues of Abraham Lincoln has been vandalized, even though he “freed” the slaves. A statute of Teddy Roosevelt is being targeted now because it shows him on horseback with an Indian standing on one side and a Black man standing on the other side. So, how is this racist?

The statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the General who won the Civil War for the North, has been torn down. Should he not have been seen as a hero? Not by those bent on destruction and ignorant people with no working knowledge of our history.

Even George Washington’s statue did not escape their lunacy and one of the statues of Christopher Columbus has been decapitated and toppled. The statue of Francis Scott Key, who penned the words to the National Anthem, is seen as an undesirable now and they demand it be removed.

What was promoted as an end to displays of racism has devolved into sheer thirst for destruction. Or perhaps it has actually evolved into what it was designed to be from the start, an orchestrated attempt at destroying the history of America by those who hate this country.

We have seen the unprecedented rise of “Democratic Socialism,” whatever that is supposed to be, and we had Democrat Party presidential candidates run on that platform. While their campaign did not run the course, the idea has not died.

The Black Lives Matter movement has also always devolved from the idea of social equality and racial justice to an excuse to loot, burn and destroy America and the assaulting of Whites just because they are White (which is the very definition of racism itself) and into a reason to assault police officers.

Suddenly, every police officer in America is somehow to be responsible and held accountable for the actions of a small handful. By that logic, every Black person should be held accountable for every crime committed by a Black individual. Does that sound logical? Of course not, but logic for BLM is nonexistent.

The Left and BLM are joined at the hip and the erasing of “inconvenient history” or the symbols of law and order has replaced any demand for justice with brutality, savagery and anarchy. The idea of justice for George Floyd, a Black career criminal who was incarcerated nine times on drug, thief and gun charges, who once held a loaded gun on the belly of a pregnant Black woman while his five friends robbed her house, and who was raised to the level of hero and martyr by the Democrats and BLM, has long disappeared.

There is a method to their madness and it involves chaos and civil disobedience carried to the extreme. It is to collapse the economy, overrun society with confusion and turmoil, open the door to whatever “solution” the Left says they represent, and currently to install protestors as a protected class of people and even giving over portions of cities like Seattle to them for their nonsense to be carried out without interference by police, the influence and power they are demanding be stripped from the community.

In Denver, the police have been removed from city schools because the logic of the city council says that this move will make students, especially “students of color” feel safer. How does that work? I guess the possibility of another mass school shootings does not bother them as much as their child seeing a uniformed police officer protecting them does.

State governors have issued warnings to everyday citizens to “remain in their homes unless you are protesting.” After being told for months that the Coronavirus was deadly and we must isolate ourselves to restrict the possibility of spreading it, protestors are allowed to gather by the thousands with no repercussions, further illustrating the fact that responses to this “virus crisis” is guided by politics, not medicine, science or even commonsense.

Both the Covid-19 responses by Democrat governors and the BLM movement have the same goal, the elimination of what we know America to be. It won’t stop any time soon because those governors that are enabling the protestors, and backing off even when their cities are being burned, are Leftists with the same inherent desire, to see America “fundamentally changed” just as Obama promised to do when he was elected. They are carrying on his efforts that he left unfinished.

We will likely never fully understand the extent that the responses to this pandemic will have on America and its population. Apart from the economic impact, where they shut down over 50% of all retain store spaces in the country and cost the economy trillions of dollars, we are seeing a spike in suicides as their fear promoting has driven some past the place where they could see that life is worth living.

And another side of the coin has been the assault on Christianity. Christians and Jews were told by New York City mayor Di Blasio, for example, to remain at home and if they were to reopen their churches and places of worship, they would be arrested, while at the same time, he patted himself on the back for having fed “hundreds of thousands” of Muslims (by his own estimate) during Ramadan.

So, what we are seeing is an assault on America, its heritage, it’s traditions, its history and its future, all in the name of tolerance and civility even though their methods are anything but tolerant and civil.

America is at a crossroads and where we end up will determine which fork we take. Will we demand a return to peaceful communities and the honoring of America’s past and present, even while attempting to make it a better place to live, or we take the path that will cause us to see the destruction of this great American experiment complete?

The time for not taking a stand and for avoiding politics, as nasty and as messy as it can get, is past. We have seen what the promotion of fear and hysteria has done to us and our willful obedience has made us complicit in the result. We will either be an influence in what happens to America from this day forward, or we will find ourselves one day scratching our heads and wondering, “What happened to America I once knew?”

Glen Spicer

Remembering When America Felt Like Home

Even with the all challenges of childhood, the parental control, (all for our own good, of course), and the authority that we were under at school, our lives still once felt very much intact. We felt safe, secure and free. America was a different place than it is today.

I grew up in the era of anti-establishment sentiment, anti-Vietnam marches and anti-war rhetoric at college. I remember holding a small white candle in a dark college room where we mourned and stood in silence honoring the four students senselessly murdered by soldiers at Kent State on that tragic day.

I saw leaders like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. shot down. I waved at Bobby Kennedy as he went past me on a California street only to see him shot down two weeks later. America was not always a wonderful place but then again, it was.

Among all those periods of chaos, America had a different “feel” to it. America, even with all its unpredictability, held a strange sense of predictability. America felt like “home”.

Days were filled with music as Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan showed us that magic could come from six strings. Later the birth of MTV opened up the world of video and wonderfully it was more than the scantily clad vixens, raw sex and gangster rap that assaults the senses of anyone who tries to watch it today.

The Beatles Magic Mystery Tour exposed us to visions and lyrics never before shared on vinyl, of which is not even a memory for the youth of today. Short-lived eight track tapes and cassette tapes have given way to Cds and DVDs demonstrating progress although some of today’s music of raw noise and screamed lyrics are a waste of the plastic it is recorded on.

Today, America feels like a foreign country, one into which I was thrown without my permission. With all its dangers and insanity, I can’t tell anymore which way is up and which way is down. Perhaps it is because the ways I once considered “down”, ways of Communism, socialism, Marxism, oppression, and political abuse are suddenly being unashamedly proclaimed as the road we should travel.

The people we once reviled and pointed to as the insane madmen we should fight to oust, are suddenly held in high regard by those in power in our own government and even in the White House. Radicals and self-proclaimed Communists surround our president as they lift high the praise of Chairman Mao, “Uncle Joe” Stalin, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Che Quevara. What once was down is now considered the way up.

America was built out of an uninviting wilderness into a nation of promise, wealth, opportunity and high ideals. It was founded on a freedom of religion and free speech and individual rights. That was the way up from tyranny that we chose. And now we are finding those in power saying that way is out-dated and needs to be “changed” into another.

Freedom of religion has become freedom FROM religion. Christianity is scoffed at while Islam is even taught in some schools under the guise of learning tolerance. Too bad tolerance of Christianity isn’t worth promoting. Freedom of speech seems only protected when it promotes pornography, sexual perversion or the same political views as those in power. All other voices are deserving of being stamped out in the name of civility.

Political Correctness is a disease that stops every effort to expose what is wrong in this country. The “City on the hill” is under attack. Its walls are being torn down and its very foundations dug up and relegated to the dustbin of useless history. The way we always saw as “up” is now considered the way down.

The adage that “you cannot step into the same river twice” makes us realize that things do change. But the changes being forced upon us today are not signs of progress but of regression, not of promise but hopelessness, not of a move forward but a rapid move backward toward oppression, control and tyranny. Our freedoms are in jeopardy. Our liberties are being taken away almost daily without even an apology or reasonable excuse.

The Constitution is very specific as to the rights afforded us as people but liberal judges and the current president and all that surround him seek to rewrite it. Will our grandchildren even know the greatness of the country that changed the world?

We fled the narrow, limited existence that held such misery for us and created an America where we could rid ourselves of such wrongs. And now, as we have chosen not to remember that history of struggle, we are being led headlong back into that darkness which we fought and many died to escape from.

That wonderful land we were born into is fading in the mist of uncertainty. The challenges today are greater and the dangers more threatening than ever before. But the America I remember could always find a way to stand tall above it and find our way home again.

How did we get to the place where so many feel America needs to be totally transformed? How did we get to the place where we excitedly elected a man to the presidency whose main goal is to “fundamentally transform the United States of America”, using Barack Obama’s own words that he spoke with enthusiasm, arrogance and pride?

When did America begin not to feel like home anymore? Regardless of the answer to that question of when, we do hope in our hearts that somehow we can find our way home again. The path may be cold and overgrown with weeds but maybe, just maybe, we can still find it buried under the weedy distractions. Maybe we can clear the way enough for us to follow it back to where we were destined to remain.

As a matter of life and death, America needs to make its way home to its roots and once again build on the foundations that made it great in the first place. If we cannot, nothing else matters.