I was trying to think of good ideas for signs to take to rallies in support of democracy and the rule of law in America. I came up with Imagine No Dishonesty in the manner of John Lennon’s Imagine lyrics, and I thought the idea was pretty good until I fell to pondering the subjective nature of honesty and dishonesty.
So I decided a less confusing sign would be Imagine No Intentional Dishonesty. But then I realized intentional dishonesty is simply lying, which brought me to Imagine No Lying.
I tried to imagine a political system in which no one lies, and that tickled me for a few minutes until I came back around to the subjective nature of truth. We have a President who, from my point of view, lies constantly. Yet I’m pretty sure he doesn’t think he’s lying. I think he thinks everything he says is the truth. And what about the millions of people who believe everything he says? From their point of view he is incapable of lying.
Recently the President said, “America won World War II. If America hadn’t won World War II you would all be speaking German now, or Japanese.” When I heard him say this I realized that was exactly what I’d been taught in school and through popular culture when I was growing up: that until the United States entered the war on the side of the allies, the Germans and Japanese were winning the war. I was also taught that America won the war by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killing hundreds of thousands of people instantly.
Then I went to college, and though I only stayed in college for two years, I had some fascinating eye-opening courses, one of which everyone in my class of 1967 at Stevenson College at UC Santa Cruz was required to take. The course was entitled Stability and Change in the USSR from 1917 to the Present, taught by a brilliant professor from Hungary.
One of the many things I liked about this professor was that he urged us to thoroughly research anything he told us in his lectures that we had a hard time believing. And one of the things he told us that I had trouble believing (regarding whether America was the reason the allies won World War II) was that for every division the German army had on the western front fighting America, Great Britain, and France, they had five divisions on the eastern front fighting the Russians.
Now if what my professor told us was true, then for every million soldiers Germany had fighting America, Great Britain, and France, they had five million troops fighting Russia. And it was Germany exhausting five times as much of their resources and military might against Russia that was a primary contributor to the collapse of the German War machine. I spent hours and days in the university library researching this hard-to-believe thing my professor told us, and found his assertion to be true.
Yet prior to learning this truth, I was absolutely certain that what I previously believed to be the truth was the truth.
So I abandoned my Imagine No Dishonesty sign idea and came up with Imagine Government Founded On Kindness and Generosity. This, of course, is rife with words and ideas every bit as subjective as truth, but I like imagining my notions of kindness and generosity as the foundations for everything our next government does.
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