Be vigilant

The Washington Post has documented President Trump’s some 12,000 tweets or statements since he took office, finding that 75% of them were outright lies or simply false and misleading. Trump’s record strongly suggests that he spews out lies, lies, and more lies. He lies so much it would not come as a surprise if his pants caught fire one day. How should Trump’s base, some of whom are parents, react should their own children lie? How should colleagues at work react to others’ lies? How should partners and spouses react to each other’s lies?

In our modern world of mass communications, a major challenge is to distinguish fact from fiction, reality from the absurd. The free-flow sharing of information in our age of mass social media comes in multiple forms, including photos, music, news outlets and more. This information overload is a constant challenge - a challenge requiring each of us to step aside from our biases and to make sense of and distinguish between what is true and what is false, between reliable information and unreliable misinformation.

This is a constant and difficult challenge - one that we encountered yesterday, will encounter today and will face more of the same tomorrow. We are forced to distinguish between causes and events, actions and outcomes, information and misinformation. Now is the time to step aside from our biases to make sense of world, national, or domestic events. Be vigilant, voters, be very, very vigilant, and do your homework!

Robert McGinty

Liberty Lake