Sunday, July 10, 2016

HONESTY, TRUTH,and STUFF

It’s easy to define honesty and easy to define truth and sometimes difficult to distinguish between them.  Stuff is a lot harder to catch ahold of as most often it will contain components of the other two active nouns.   Easy differentiation between honesty and truth can easily be determined.  Honesty is simply those things that one sincerely believes in, while truth is based solely on those things that can be factually proven.  Stuff, on the other hand is harder to trap in any sort of specific definition.  Stuff can be part of an actual belief and will most generally contain some smidgen of truth.  The truth portion is included and serves the purpose of one thing, to make it credible.  We see all three of these things on a daily basis. Some are obvious, some are not.  One thing you can be positive about and that is stuff is going to be hidden, insidiously, inside statements containing a bit of the truth item.  Sometimes this occurs honestly.
The use of propaganda is nothing new.  Human beings have used this pretty much since the beginning of time.  I can even see biblical inference to that as far back as Cain when he threw the misdirected curve “am I my brother’s keeper”?  History has illuminated propaganda’s use of stuff during wartime, sometimes for good results sometimes for ill. Our society is being greatly affected by this practice, some of us are aware of it coming from every direction and the effectiveness of it is apparent.  The strength brought to our nation for the last two and one half centuries is that of a strong cable formed of innumerable individual strands.  United we stand has been more than just a motto it has been a glue that has helped our nation become one of the strongest, most inventive, most generous and free of any nation throughout history.  Our national unity, the cable, is and has been taken apart a strand at a time.  The methodical erosion, seductively employed by political factions and ideologies to separate us into easily swayed groups, has been hastened by news media, educators, zealots and the inherent laziness of those who honestly accept stuff without truth.
For the majority of us, the news media has been our source of gathering data.  Unfortunately, this source is no longer reliable as a provider of truth.  We can no longer base decisions on what we read or what we hear as being factual and complete.  We are led to believe, by a form of mass manipulation, by conspiracy theories, the stuff behind agenda as being honest and true.  We need to start thinking for ourselves. We need to examine those things which we honestly believe to be true.  We need to follow through in order to find truth, follow that with honest logic and we need to take the time to get it right.  We need to ask: “what is the underlying agenda to what we are being led to believe and does it pass the smell test?”  We also need to be honest with ourselves.  Asking: “what is my own personal agenda?” How much truth or how much stuff is in my honesty?  Finally, what is the possible motivation or agenda behind that which we are being asked to believe?
There are so many points of dissention bombarding us on a daily basis it would be really difficult to pinpoint what is most important to us as individuals.  Without a doubt, somethings are at a critical mass in each of our individual list of topics.  Thanks to the ease of disbursing stuff, we seem to be at each other’s throats.  It is increasingly simple to create a state of mass dissatisfaction inside a population in pain due to a large number of causes.  Most of us are affected and influenced emotionally by terrorism, unemployment and those things we deem as unfair to ourselves and or others.  We all are aware of what the other guy should do to make things better. We all know what he has done to put us in those terrible situations.  We of course stand alone, blameless in our “honest” assessment of reality.  If you or anyone else presents something to you on a topic in the sake of your own honesty, put it through the sifter of truth. 
We are witness to the results of an anger based on partial truths, on discoloration of fact and the opportunistic advancement of agendas that are dangerous to all of us.  How much anger will it take to give anarchy the home field advantage?  If you are to believe that law enforcement has an agenda of causing harm to you, your neighborhood, your race or your religion, find the facts and the truth that supports your beliefs.  If you believe that a war being declared on law enforcement is justified, that physical confrontation and the use of violence are justified, it’s time to check out your moral compass.  If you believe that the NBP movement’s involvement is a positive part of the Black Lives Matter movement, you need to have a look at the real agenda and approaches used by the New Black Panther group.  If you think anti-white, anti-police rhetoric is not agenda driven, an agenda of making some self-promoting demagogue appear relevant, you need a dose of logic.  You should be looking at the historical, not just to see what has happened in the past, but to the motivations behind those shoveling stuff in your direction.  Ask yourself, what do they want, what are they willing to do to get it, is what they are really after good for me and my family? 
Police are not all perfect, our nation is not perfect and neither you nor I are perfect.  The majority of our society wants what is best, not just for ourselves but for our neighbors.  One of the Judeo-Christian precepts is that we love our neighbor as ourselves.  One of the parables used to clarify that command was that of the “good Samaritan”.  In this parable the Samaritan sought out and provided the means to heal a Jewish traveler after he had been beaten by thieves.  In historical context, Jews and Samaritans did not like each other and both nations acted out prejudicially.  Sound familiar? Who is your neighbor, I ask that he have no color, and as for race we are all the same, human.  

God bless our country and our people and please heal our nation.  Pray for our country.

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