Get the Facts

Too many people like to comment on situations before they have the facts. This is disastrous to all parties involved. Commenting on situations without the facts, and doing so vigorously, has the potential to make whatever that situation is worse.

The more I hear people talk, the more I believe that 99.9% of what we hear is usually rumor, and that just leaves 0.01% to be the truth. You’ve probably heard of the experiment where you tell one person something and let them tell someone else who tells someone else who tells someone else, and this goes on until 20-30 people have been told. The last person tells the first person, and lo and behold, what the last person says is not what the first person said. The point is simple. The more mouths a story travels through, the more changes will take place. This happens all the time. Part of the problem is that people just don’t listen to what is said. The other part of the problem is that if they do listen, they only hear the parts they want to hear. Next thing you know, 20 to 30 people later, a whole new version of the “truth” has been created.

The problem with basing your reactions on information you don’t get straight from the source results in creating negative situations. People easily become angry to start with, so give them a situation based on a rumor that is nowhere near the truth, and they react angrily. They make statements based on the inaccuracies, and the next thing you know, people are spreading that statement around like it is a fact. And that’s where the major problem comes in. Rumors are presented as facts and everybody gets in a tizzy and things just escalate from there.

The solution is simple. Take 99.9% of what you hear with a grain of salt. Before you add something to the dialogue, get the facts, and get them from somebody who actually has the authority to give them. And after you get the facts, before you add something to the dialogue, find a respectful way to do it. Everybody deserves your respect, and if you can’t be part of a conversation and be respectful while doing it, then refrain from joining the conversation. Everybody has an opinion, and that’s their right. Respect their right to believe something different than you believe and their right to express it. If we could just get the facts straight before we jump into a situation and if we could be respectful when we jump in, wouldn’t the world be a much better place? Remember, you get out of something what you put in to it. If you’re feeding negativity into a situation where you don’t have all the facts, you’re just going to be left in one big negative mess. I’m pretty sure that’s not where anybody wants to be.

The Election, Part II: The Spin

This is the second part of a three-part blog related to the 2012 Presidential election. Yesterday’s blog addressed the debates, and today we are picking up with how our candidates spin the truth.

First, as I frequently tell my students, the same fact or piece of evidence can be used to support both sides of the argument. It all depends on the spin, or the context, that fact or piece of evidence is given. Politicians do it. Lawyers do it. In fact, all of us have done it at some point in our lives. Watch the back-to-back political ads on TV right now. Andy Barr and Ben Chandler are infamous for taking the same “fact” and weaving a different tale.

Second, a spin can be put on things by telling half-truths. By telling only part of the truth, one can create a context to support his or her side of an issue. Politicians do this frequently. In fact, all of us have done the same. When as Paul Harvey used to say “the rest of the story” comes out, we conveniently begin to spin for our favored candidate. If it is our candidate, then it was a half-truth, that little piece of omitted information wasn’t really necessary anyway. If it is not our candidate, it is a lie of omission of significant magnitude. Obviously, “half-truth” sounds a little better than “lie of omission” in the world of euphemisms, but here’s the thing. You may as well call a spade a spade because whether you use “half-truth” or “lie of omission,” it’s the same thing. There is a reason why if you are called to testify in court you are required to take an oath to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Political candidates do not take this same oath. There will be half-truths and lies of omission. It is your job as the voter to dig a little deeper when this comes to light and figure out what the available facts indicate.

Let’s look at a quick example. Consider a 60-year-old candidate running for the office of president. Is it really important for me to know that at age 19 he had a DUI arrest? Have we not all made some stupid mistakes in our pasts? Especially at age 19? If, however, this information comes to light during the campaign and the candidate didn’t reveal it himself, the opposing candidate accuses him of lying about his past. Sometimes information that has been withheld during a half-truth/lie of omission isn’t relevant at all; sometimes it may prove to be. In this example, it hardly seems relevant. It would be more telling if this 60-year-old candidate has a chronic history of DUI arrests, or at least many recent DUI arrests. We learn from our experiences, and if that episode at age 19 was the only DUI arrest he had, how would that be relevant to the present? We all make mistakes. Failure to learn from those mistakes is more problematic than making the mistake. Do we really need to know every mistake our candidates have ever made? I don’t think so. Would you want every mistake you ever made to be on the nightly news? I doubt it.

That said, ideally our candidates would all be forthright and honest all the time about the issues that do matter, but unfortunately, there are times when they are not. There are times when all of us are less honest and forthright than we should be. However, we should try to demonstrate those qualities of honesty and integrity all the time. And we should expect our candidates to do the same. I have heard some say our candidates should be more honorable and honest than we are, but I don’t necessarily agree with that, especially since we should be honest all the time. I do agree that candidates should demonstrate integrity and honesty in regard to their intentions.

Unfortunately the trend has become such that it is difficult to completely trust what any politician says. This says as much about us as a society as it does about our politicians because we have allowed this to occur. I hate to think that we have let it go so far that a truly honest man could not have a chance to win the office of President, but I’m not sure one could. And that’s more than a little sad.

Having said all that, should I be watching the debates, even though I have made up my mind who will get my vote? Yeah, I probably should watch them anyway. I would have firsthand information about what occurred rather than having to rely on the bias of both my Facebook friends and the bias of the media for my information. While I don’t mind the bias of my Facebook friends (they are, after all, only individually exercising their First Amendment right to free speech, and I fully support that), I do mind the bias of the media.

Tomorrow’s blog will address the concept of media bias.