America’s Truth Recession
My latest, in today’s Nebraska Examiner…
November was a pretty rough month for truth.
TikTok had to pull down a hashtag associated with viral videos sympathetic to, of all people, Osama bin Laden. Renewed interest in his “Letter to America” led many Americans — especially young Americans — to view bin Laden and his cause in a new light. Perhaps you thought bin Laden was a pretty terrible guy for killing 2,977 Americans (mostly civilians) in the deadliest terrorist attack in world history and hiding behind his young wife when justice came for him. Well, a lot of people are not so sure.
Then, last month, House Speaker Mike Johnson began releasing video from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Utah Sen. Mike Lee accused lawmakers of having deliberately suppressed the footage and suggested that Johnson’s release will allow us to find out what really happened that day. But perhaps, like me, you watched the violent storming of the Capitol in real-time, in utter horror at the crashing of barriers, smashing of windows and calls to hunt down and kill Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence. Maybe you think the fact people were standing around before and after brutalizing police officers is not all that relevant. Well, a lot of people are not so sure.
These are but two troubling examples of America’s truth recession, where what is true depends on what the algorithms deliver to your social media feed. In America’s truth recession, we don’t trust our leaders, the media, or each other. In America’s truth recession, we are each responsible for determining our own truth — an impossible burden and crippling responsibility.
So what do we do? Let’s be intentional about our commitment to truth. Let’s make the truth as important as love or kindness or courage or selflessness, because it is an essential ingredient in each. Along the way, truth will sometimes challenge our biases — but we have to recognize that things we desperately don’t want to be true might be true nonetheless.
Knowing that the truth isn’t always profitable or popular, it might be time to clean up our junk food media diet. And while we’re at it, let’s make friends with people who don’t think the same things we do. Let’s listen twice as much as we talk. And let’s control the one thing in our power: Always, always, tell the truth to others.
How you tell the truth matters, too, by the way. If your truth-telling leaves your audience not believing you and never wanting to listen to you again, you might not be a very good truth-teller. So speak the truth with humility and grace.
We can’t begin our truth recovery unless we are honest about how things are now. And it’s not great, as recent events have shown. But we can fix it by sticking with the truth. We can fix it by sticking with one another.
And that’s the God’s honest truth.
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