After listening to the Republican National Convention’s final night of speeches Thursday, I find myself needing to speak on behalf of truth.
“What is truth?” Pilate asks Jesus on his final day. Jesus does not speak, perhaps because his tongue is swollen, his mouth sealed shut from his beatings. Or perhaps it’s like we’ve been told to interpret his silence: because the truth speaks for itself.
Not long after the first presidential debate of the 2024 campaign, I was standing at the kitchen sink scrubbing more carrots. On public radio the day before, I’d heard a wonderful story about a summer youth camp for stutterers. The young stutterers spoke, some stuttering less than others, about how wonderful it was to be together with others like themselves. They didn’t say how wonderful it was to be in a place where non-stutterers were absent, how important it was to be free of the bullies who made fun of them, even beat them up because they stuttered. They didn’t say how great it was to be free of impatient adults as well.
The first rule of the camp was to let whoever was speaking finish what they were saying, no matter how long it took. This one rule made it possible for the stutterers to get their confidence up. Many reported making progress, having breakthroughs in their affliction. Many said they were looking forward to being able to talk like other people someday. They sounded hopeful, ready to go back to the real world.
There at the sink I remembered that our current president, Joe Biden, was a stutterer. He taught himself not to stutter because he wanted so much to be in politics. There at the sink, mentally I saw the little boy being bashed because he couldn’t respond with the right words fast enough, and my heart went out to that now-elderly little boy. Did right words even exist? How can you debate a tornado of lies? That’s what came at him: a bombardment of force unimpeded by the truth.
But what makes me think I know that lies fueled that tornado? Aargh. What my kitchen sink reveries produced next was the image of a lie detector, a machine we all could trust to keep us aware when we’re being taken for a ride. At first my heart wailed that we’ll never find such a machine. And then I remembered something a friend wrote about the New York jury trial that handed Donald Trump his convictions on thirty-six counts of felony lying last month.
Before a jury of ordinary people who were sworn to do their very best to weigh the evidence presented to them, the truths they saw led them to conclude Donald Trump was guilty of financial shenanigans. They saw that he had knowingly mishandled money and financial records to save himself from paying taxes that you and I would have to pay, and he had used others to take the fall for him should he be caught. Those jurors, on behalf of the state of New York and at some serious risk and cost to themselves, served as our lie detectors.
I believe each one of us has a kind of lie detector inside of us. It’s what we use when deciding whether to trust a stranger or even a friend, or how to handle a new set of circumstances. They’re not always reliable, these internal guidance systems, but they can be improved with exercise and thought, like some post-game wrap-ups to revise and hone our judgments about who and what we can trust in the next round. Or not.
It is very much time to begin using our fact-checking skills, and to ask each other why we believe what we believe. We need to understand where our sources of truth come from and find out from each other where our needs overlap. If we hesitate, if we fail to do these ordinary citizen things and don’t seek some common ground soon, whatever pavement is on the road to hell won’t matter.
Trudy Wischemann is a truth-tester who writes. You can send her your lie detector techniques c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247. This column is not a news article but the opinion of the writer and does not reflect the views of the Mid Valley Times newspaper.
