I’ve been kind of obsessed with the fickle relationship most people have with the truth.  As important as it seems to be in most cultural approaches to parenting, we are all guilty of playing fast and loose with our adherence to holding it dear; the fib, the white lie, the all-out load of utter bullshit…raise your hand, (in the privacy of your secret space), if you have not run the gambit.  To be clear, my particular obsession has been with altering memory and personal history by purposely or otherwise misrepresenting the past.  I’ve found, that in most of those instances, as drastically off course as they may be, they tend, in the scheme of things, to be benign, stuff like people making themselves the hero of a story where they were merely a bystander.  At the end of the day, other than the real hero, who cares?  BUT, when truth is weaponized, when bullshit is psychologically injected into the minds of susceptible, needy people by charismatic authority figures and a truthless President to incite moral indignation based on nothing but lies…WTF!?

If you give a F…here’s W.

I’m neither an anthropologist, nor do I play one on the InterNet, but without providing the scholarly details, I can assure you, (although this may sneeze in the face of my developing thesis), that humans are, in the vast majority, sheeplike.  We are most comfortable when we find a comfy clan or cause or niche to nuzzle up to.  Over the course of our evolution, either by choice or coercion or fear of being alone, we have gravitated towards strong, “holy” leaders and their dogma of always mysterious, although righteously expounded origin.  There were almost always, promises of inclusion, protection and fulfillment in this life…and the next.  Those gatherings became tribes and nations, cults and religions and each required a pledge of allegiance, a leap of faith and a degree of zealotry in seeing all others as misguided at best and evil when stirred to the extreme.  Of the 7.674 billion people on Earth, 6.44616 billion of us profess to follow one, or more, of the 4,300, or so, “organized” religions.  We are crammed into 193 countries on six habitable continents and are inundated and influenced by the economies, alliances, governance and good and bad Nature of our chosen or predestined geography and the choices or limitations of belief systems.  The “holy” men, or monarchs, or Presidents, Prime Ministers, generals, witch doctors or despots, pontificate the rules, rally the masses, demand their fealty and send them off to war against the other 4,299 whose divine mandate must be blasphemous and dangerous…right?  So, QANON or Scientology or Mormonism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Church of Donald J. Trump…faith is faith, misguided or otherwise and the result is almost always violent.  This is not the first or only instance of the ascendance of an amoral leader with a pulpit and message that rings true to the otherwise hopeless and disenfranchised…Jesus not giving you what you need?…try Trump!  Or, maybe a little of both…or some Q for good measure?  Certainly, it would be way too simplistic and radical to think that extracting the essence of most of those above-mentioned 4,300, kindness toward one another, could be an answer.  WTF!?