I am not surprised we have come to this moment in our national life.

People are dying now because they did not know the truth about COVID-19. Some weeks ago I was at a gathering where one of the young men present said, “Chill out, this is just the flu.” There was no point in arguing with him, however, that lack of knowledge could come back to hurt him and his family deeply. I hope not but we will only know this in a couple of months if then.

The problem is that collectively, we struggle with the truth. Over the last few years, we have seen the notion of “my/your truth” bubble up. In past generations we have generally understood this phrase to be ranked in the category of your/my opinion or your understanding of yourself, your relationships, or your world. However, we never recognized it as “truth.”

It is the irony of ironies before you can offer testimony in a court of law, the witness is sworn in. The oath they take is something like “Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God,” or perhaps “so help you.” Then, what happens next is two different attorneys elicit, contradict, massage, distort or otherwise attempt to obfuscate or shape the truth in a way that benefits their client.

So why is this business of the truth important now? With a world of choices regarding who we trust to tell the truth, that trust can be dangerously misplaced. People must exercise due diligence in holding a certain skepticism toward voices which are markedly different from the rest of the voices speaking into our lives. We abdicate our responsibility to measure what is heard against the truth at our own and our family's peril. For the larger part of my life(near universal pre-collaspe of communism) I believed my government would largely be honest with it's citizens and the world(I was wrong). I believed the propaganda coming from communist leaders and states were largely telling their people what they wanted them to know and what they wanted the world to hear. Those were simple days of great naivete.

I believed this day would come, this moment destined to present itself. A moment in time where it is imperative we hold out the requirement that news and media outlets, government leaders, scientists and medical practitioners speak the truth, share the facts, be transparently honest with a nation of people who need to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

We should accept nothing less or expect nothing more.