The Truth Can Set Us Free

Photo by Dave Bleasdale / Flickr

By Ernie McCray

Jim Comey. My man! I wish I could shake his hand. I mean I’ve got to put aside my deep deep deep disdain for the FBI to give props to a man who has come through with something I’ve so much wanted somebody from a high place to do — call Donald J. Trump out for what he is: a liar. For all the world to hear and see.

Of course he was stating the obvious but it needed to be said just as he said it: out loud – because some of us and the media keep cutting him slack with witty intellectualizing about what a lie really is, how a lie might not be a lie if it wasn’t intended to be a lie. What a lie all of that is.

Now, to be fair, I’d say that kind of logic might be the case with your typical run-of-the-mill fabricator, but Donaldo is a master liar. He can’t open his mouth without lying, the lies flying off his tongue like bullets from a machine gun, it seems. I mean forget “liar, liar, pants on fire” this man’s entire wardrobe is on fire. His closet is ablaze.

Then he’ll deny telling a lie while we watch him on TV telling the lie. And so many of his lies are fueled by views infused in his close-minded brain by Fox News and Breitbart News, real life “fake news,” news meant to take our eyes off the prize we seek: the truth.

Oh, it’s the truth that can set us free. Truth to power. And the truth is we have to confront this screwed up man’s warped dream of being the bee’s knees on the world scene and keep alive the American Dream.

We have to fight back against the truths within our present reality and create the truths that should be.

Trump embodies all the negatives that he uses to characterize others so when he says that journalists are a bunch of prejudiced clowns, that they’re a joke, kooky, fake, failing, dying, haters, racists, a waste, only interested in what’s negative…

We have to say “Look who’s talking!”

Or when he says that one of our Supreme Court Justice’s mind is shot or that a music legend is a hypocrite or that American icons in our political history are all talk and no action or that a former First Lady and her husband are crooked predators or that a progressive woman senator is goofy and another senator who rallied millions of young people to take part in the system is a whacko or that Democrats are pathetic or a judge who ruled against his shenanigans at his so called university is biased…

We have to say “Have you looked in the mirror?”

It’s not likely that this man is capable of not lying but that means we just have to hold him to some obvious truths. Like if he thinks, as he’s said, that the electoral process is rigged, then the truth is he needs to un-rig it.

If the Iran nuclear deal is a catastrophe and Angela Merkel is ruining Germany and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals makes ridiculous rulings and Obamacare is imploding, then the truth is he needs to do something about it without being so
inflammatory.

One Trump lie, in particular, needs to be disclaimed, his declaration that the leftists among us citizens are misguided no nothing folks who “have got to stop working at being politically correct.”

He’s got that very wrong. We should never stop being politically correct if being that way means caring about our country and our world and the future of our children; if being so means focusing our energy on what we need to bring about equality, liberty, and human rights (particularly, at this time, a woman’s right to control her body) for all – in the form of more jobs, reasonable priced health care, affordable higher education for students…

We know the truth as to why we aren’t making progress in these life-affirming areas and if we spoke that truth to power strongly enough and resigned ourselves to staying the course forever in creating the country we desire, there could be real meaning to the conviction that “The Truth can set us free.”

We certainly lose nothing pursuing such a belief.