Sunday Night With John: A Lie Is A Lie

A Lie is A Lie

John Paul Derryberry 

We are living in a new age where information outlets are so abundant it only takes two clicks or less to find someone who will reinforce your lies.

We are living in an era where messages are clearly constructed and finely filtered through every lens so the final product can appear to be factual.

We are living in a day and age where knowledge is at our fingertips, yet we find ourselves blindly believing our leaders more than ever before.

We have forgotten and abandoned an eternal truth. And that sacred truth is that a lie is a lie and it always will be. Distorted facts, misleading questions, a change of topics, and beautifully crafted non-answers; none of these change a lie into truth. It corrupts it, but we seem to be oddly comfortable with corrupted truth. What is being spewed from our leaders to us, from our Facebook's feeds into the world, and from one another is more filled with dirt than the stereo-typical college dorm room. It is as if the communicators know there is so much misinformation floating around in our world that the search for the real truth is buried much like a needle in the haystack. There is no need to mention that our short attention spans are only long enough for us to listen for what we want to hear, buying the lie when the truth is what would set us free.

 It’s a sad state when I watch the news and every question asked gets turned into a non-committal answer because the truthful answer would be too horrifying to admit. It’s an angry state of things when Facebook posts, that admonish another person or group, do not contain all the facts of the situation. It’s still a lie when important details are left out, even if those important details reflect poorly on you. We just fudge them away, because our twisted version of the truth must be confirmed. It’s this fall into the mindset that only personal gain matters, whether that gain is social status, financial, or revenge, that has us muddling the facts.

The truth has become a competition and we keep score by awarding those who can lie better. And while this writer knows all too well that he has participated in lies, because we all have, I admit they're dangerous, and they only seem to be getting bigger, more twisted, and more slanted. As the truth of who we are as a person and as a society gets buried under a multitude of lies, we continue the charade. Speaking from experience, I only began to find redemption when I stopped lying. I, too, had to admit the truth, that I was built of lies. A lie is a lie and it always will be. And that's one truth we should all agree on.