Nothing is as hard to hunt down as the truth. Like the elusive South Dakota jackalope, it's impossible to spot in the wild, and the ones people try to sell you are fakes, cobbled together from bits and pieces of reality.
When you want the truth about something, where do you look?
Where is the truth regarding government and public employee unions? One side says the unions are milking the states dry; the other says union members are underpaid. And both sides are convinced, or at least want us to be, that the very future of the Republic depends on what happens in Wisconsin. I'm disturbed that we left the future of the Republic laying around where Packer fans could get their hands on it, but no one else seems alarmed so it's probably OK.
What's the truth about Halliburton - evil corporate money-grubbers or courageous humanitarians? Depends if Dick Cheney is actually as wicked/wonderful as your party portrays him. Can health care reform work? Are Libyans capable of democracy? Will the iPad 2 make me happier?
The truth is hard, because it seems so subjective. I see tan, my wife says taupe. But next time it's not taupe, it's ecru. Or, in the case of hosiery, nude, which is a color you'd think guys would recognize immediately and women would disapprove of. You can measure all of them with a computer and place them precisely in the color space, but that means we're reduced to taking a computer's word for it. That's only slightly better than believing our spouses.
More than that, sometimes the truth seems unknowable. Yeah, FatSecret says an apple has 71 calories, but some apples are bigger, but then sometimes I don't eat as close to the core, so . . . . And did I really burn 450 calories on that run? I'm in pretty good shape, and that distance should be easier for me than some fat guy who's been on the Lazyboy workout plan for the last decade, so when they say it should burn X, which of us are they talking about? In the end, did I have a calorie deficit or surplus yesterday? How do I really know?
Yet some people seem to know. Rush Limbaugh is pretty confident he does; so is Charlie Sheen. How do those people know? How could celebrities tweet the "truth" about Bahrain when reporters couldn't get into the country? How can Westboro Baptist Church know without doubt what God is doing?
Most of the time, except for a few things that are absolute, I'm not confident I know what the truth really is. But I am confident that there is objective, unequivocal truth. I'm not supposed to be. I'm supposed to believe we're all free to find our own truth; I'm supposed to tolerate whatever nonsense anyone else wants to put out there.
Well, folks, here's a tip: Denying the truth doesn't change it. He can say Obama isn't an American citizen, she can believe chupacabras are killing motorists in Texas, you can claim the Masons control a secret world government, I can call cookies health food. I can say it, swear to it, and believe it to my dying day but that will not change the truth, no matter how many people I point to who claim to have lost 45 pounds and cured their diabetes with an all-Keeblers diet.
The truth is out there. I believe Jesus when he said he is the way, the truth and the life; a lot of people don't. That just proves that relativism doesn't work: if we believe mutually-exclusive things then we can't both have found the truth. Alternate reality was cool on The Matrix, but life doesn't work that way.
I guess I'm suggesting that we should all be seekers for truth. Instead of thoughtlessly re-tweeting or forwarding the chain e-mails or propagating any of the propaganda that pollutes our conversational space, let's take the time to be informed of the facts and to examine the data. And then let's discuss. I promise to listen before I decide; I hope you'll do the same.
