Tag Archives: Truth

Butternut and All the Heaven I Need

Why do all hospital rooms have the same look and feel? The exact same layout, lighting, temperature, and sounds form an uninspired healthcare feng shui designed (seemingly) by the unimaginative and soulless, where each room lives on the outskirts of a nurses’ station, just within earshot of the muffled voices of hospital employees and concerned family members.  

Over time, patients and their visitors accept (as elements of the hospital room lexicon) the beeps and pings that gently interrupt their conversation. 

After an extended quiet stretch in room 303, a 7-year-old girl donned in black leggings, and a pale pink dress speaks.

“Are you afraid of dying, Gramma?”

Surprised by the question, the young girl’s mother, who sits at the foot of the bed, looks up from the book she’s been pretending to read, purses her lips, and shakes her head at her daughter. 

The old woman in the hospital bed looks at her granddaughter lovingly – “No, honey, I’m not,” opening the door to conversation. 

“I’d definitely be afraid,” the seven-year-old girl says with certainty.

The young girl continues: “Why aren’t you afraid, Grandma?”

“I’m not afraid because I don’t believe there’s anything to be afraid of.”

“Hmm,” the granddaughter says with a hint of admiration.

“What do you think heaven will be like?” the granddaughter continues.

“Heaven? Oh goodness, honey! I don’t believe in heaven.”

The dying woman looks past her granddaughter to her disapproving daughter.

“Mom, please don’t,” the daughter says with a weighty resignation – hoping to close the door on the conversation before it seizes all the oxygen in the room.

“What? I’m just being honest with my little Butternut,” the grandma said, smiling warmly at the girl.

The granddaughter is intrigued by how her question animates the adults in the room. Suddenly, she feels elevated and important. Her mom’s tone tells her she is on the cusp of something bigger than her question. 

She looks at them both in a silent plea for answers.

The grandmother speaks.

“Come close, Butternut.”

The granddaughter scooches her chair closer and grabs her grandma’s hand instinctively, at which point the grandma continues:

“I’ve lived a long and happy life.” 

“My time is coming to an end.”

Pointing at her own face, the grandma says “I’ve been lucky enough to earn all these wrinkles and crinkles (the granddaughter chuckles at the rhyme).

“I expect that when I die, I won’t feel a thing – I’ll simply stop being.” 

The grandma looks at her granddaughter intently and says:

“I don’t want you to fret about me! Do you understand? 

I’ll live in your memory and your mom’s memory for a while, which is good enough for me – living in your memory is all the heaven I need.”  

The girl keeps her head bowed, holds back her tears, and fiddles with the ties on the back of her Barbie doll’s bikini — all while trying to conceptualize human mortality and the consequence of loss heaped on her by her dying grandmother. 

The daughter clears her throat and speaks quietly to the girl.

“What Grandma is saying, honey, is that she’ll be fine even after she’s gone – so we don’t need to worry about her.”

The child looks at her mom then at her grandmother for confirmation.

“Well, not exactly,” the grandmother responds to her daughter’s attempt at shielding the granddaughter from the truth.

“What I’m saying, Butternut, is when all those dings and beeps finally fall silent (pointing to the equipment mounted on the wall above the bed), so will I.

That doesn’t mean I’ll be fine – it simply means I’ll be gone – and I’m okay with that.”

“Mom, she’s 7 for God’s Sake! She doesn’t need to hear this.”

With a laser-like focus that belies her age and terminal condition, the grandmother turns towards her daughter’s words – her slate-grey eyes burn with newfound purpose.

 “Well, I think she does need to hear it – and even if she doesn’t, I need to say it.”

The grandmother continues to speak in the direction of her daughter.

“When you’re dying, there’s nothing tangible to hold on to. Instead, there’s a constant and continuous feeling of being adrift until eventually you relinquish control to doctors, nurses, epidemiologists, and every other soul that hums about this godforsaken place on a daily basis.” 

The grandma continues:

“The two things I still control today are my thoughts and feelings – and the last thing I want is to lie to my granddaughter about my thoughts and feelings.”

“I don’t want liars’ guilt knocking around my noggin as I drift off to my final sleep.“

“I want to be honest, strong, and a fucking font of truth to my granddaughter.”

“Grandma! You said a bad word!”

“Ha!” the grandma laughs and smiles at her granddaughter and says, “There’s no such thing as a bad word, Butternut!” 

The grandma leans back in bed, looks at her granddaughter and speaks. 

“Ask me anything, Butternut! “

“Now’s the time.”

Tipping Points

Israel says there is a safe zone for civilians in the south of Gaza. 

Israel suggests that Hamas is preventing civilians from going to that safe zone because separating Gazan civilians from Hamas means fewer civilian casualties, which is terrible for Hamas because (according to Israel) Hamas relies on civilian casualties as fodder for their propaganda machine.

So, who do we believe? 

How do we, the ones watching this conflict from the outside, get to the truth to form an opinion?

It is hard to trust the controlling parties on either end of this conflict, and in that scenario, everyone in the middle gets obliterated.

And let’s not forget that our struggle for truthfulness is nothing compared to what Gazan civilians are facing hourly. Gazans are struggling to live and breathe just long enough to bury their dead.

Americans understand the raw rage that Israel holds towards Hamas. It mirrors what we felt towards Al-Qaida on September 12th, 2001. We understand a desire for payback that originates from the gut – it’s what drives our support of Israeli efforts to uproot and destroy Hamas.

But I’m guessing there’ll come a point where support for Israel tips in the other direction – when our gut reaction to the sheer number of civilian casualties forces us to say, “Enough!”

Who will be the last Israeli soldier, Hamas terrorist, or Gazan civilian to die before we reach that point, and will it matter? 

How can civilians in the “political middle” of this conflict affect change now when they couldn’t affect change before the conflict? – Isn’t the task of effecting change way more difficult today? 

Gaza is in ruins. Survivors filled with rage and hopelessness will be looking for payback, and the peace and security that many Israelis seek has become less of a possibility. 

It’s hard to find hope in any of this.

Truth, lies, opportunism, and the disintegration of Josh Hawley

Josh Hawley saw an opportunity in the angry, throbbing-with-hate, wild-eyed, vein-popping crowd of Trump supporters.


He felt the energy of that crowd’s rage and understood if he could harness it, he could jettison himself to the front of the 2024 Republican presidential pack. The only thing that stood in the way of that happening was the truth.
For months leading up to the 2020 Presidential election, and every day after it, Americans were fed a constant diet of lies that the election was rigged. Those lies breathed life into the January 6th insurrection that resulted in 5 dead, including a capital police officer.


Josh Hawley knows that President Trump did not win the 2020 election. He understands that every election comes with some irregularities and that in the 2020 election, those irregularities were minor and had no impact on the outcome. President Trump got drubbed by more than 7 million votes in an election deemed by Trump’s own election security expert as the most secure election in the history of our country.


Hawley’s motives leading up to the events of January 6th were seditious. His explanation of why he voted to overturn a free and fair election is both laughable and disingenuous.


Hawley said the people of Missouri had concerns about the integrity of the election, and as their senator, he was obligated to make sure their voices were heard.


If we listened to Hawley’s words in a vacuum, they sound reasonable and almost noble. But Hawley’s obligation as a US Senator is not to blindly support the concerns of his constituency, especially when those concerns are based on false information and lies. No, his job as a Senator is to tell those people the truth, even if that truth is complicated for some of them to hear – even if that truth becomes somewhat of a hindrance to Mr. Hawley’s political aspirations.


But Hawley did not do that. Instead, he used the divisive and volatile climate to elevate his own political profile and boost his presidential aspirations. This was a test of Josh Hawley’s character, and he failed miserably – and it’s an example of why character matters in our representatives.

I’m reminded of when John McCain was confronted with a lie about President Obama and how he responded to that lie.

McCain was holding a town hall, answering questions from his supporters, when a woman took hold of the microphone and said she did not trust Senator Obama because he was an Arab. Now, this woman was not alone in her fears – she and the nation had been fed a constant diet of lies about the President’s birth origin and religious affiliation.

McCain could have used that lie to fire up his base – he could have viewed all those false stories about Obama as campaign kindling, and he could have used that moment with that woman to sew division, doubt, and fan the flames of bigotry. Doing so might have given him a boost politically. But instead, McCain took the microphone from that supporter and respectfully told her that she was wrong – that she was misinformed and that senator Obama was not an Arab, but rather a decent American, who he happened to disagree with on the issues facing America.

That moment was a test of John McCain’s character, and he passed it with flying colors. McCain was not stupid. He understood the potential benefits off manipulating the lie about President Obama. But to John McCain’s credit, he understood that correcting that lie was far more important than any political momentum to be gained from it — because lies like that, the lies that divide Americans, are dangerous to democracy.

Regarding the lie about a rigged election, Josh Hawley and President Trump did the exact opposite of what a true leader should do: confront the lie head-on and stop it in its track. Instead, Trump and Hawley consistently propagated rumors that they knew were false for opportunity’s sake.

Truth is the sticking agent in the masonry mix of democracy. Without it, the foundation of our country crumbles.

Under the Trump administration, the truth became a malleable political commodity. It was hammered, reshaped, forged in lies, and repurposed for political gain.

Every administration plays with the truth on occasion, spinning it to suit this or that political reality. But spinning the truth is not the same as creating your own version of it to deceive and manipulate the public and to galvanize your own political power. That’s not spin – that’s propaganda. That’s a weapon.

The desecration of truth that happened during the 4-years of the Trump administration is the strongest argument for why character matters.

A presidential candidate with a high moral character knows that manufacturing a false truth for self-gain is inherently wrong. On the other hand, a presidential candidate with low moral character sees manufactured truth as a tool, a means to an end. And when such a person gains access to power and the levers of government to wield that power, our democracy enters a dangerous and precarious situation. The culminating consequence of 4-years of manufactured truth is what we witnessed and experienced collectively on January 6th, 2021.

The Trump administration had a strategy for truth, and truthfulness was not part of it.

The Trump strategy for truth was this:

As long as we hold the reins of power, we’ll use alternate facts, cherry-pick data, and create a version of the truth that serves our political agenda and strengthens our hold on power.

We’ll weaponize our strategy by publishing our version of truth on communication platforms like Twitter and Facebook. 

We’ll use these channels to magnify and reinforce the lies about voter fraud and a rigged election. And our supporters will spread these lies (knowingly or unwittingly) either way; the lies will take root.

The strategy, like Donald Trump himself, was utterly devoid of ethics.

But it worked.

For 4-years, the Trump administration designed their own version of the truth to meet a pre-defined set of facts. Then, they leveraged conspiracy theories and right-winged websites to discredit actual truth and to stand up for their own version of it. Finally, they injected their version of truth into the public square with mindful malevolence, feeding the masses lies and misinformation through every available communication channel.

Artificial Intelligence, the internet, and behavioral algorithms helped spread the lies incredibly and quickly.

Trump’s 4-year disinformation campaign and an all-out assault on truth was a mass poisoning of America’s mind by a well-oiled propaganda machine. The result? A cult-like following impervious to any information that goes counter to the narrative pushed by the President and his administration.

But unlike Jonestown or Waco, the Trump cult hasn’t succumbed to arsenic-laced Kool-Aid or fiery smoke. Instead, this mass poisoning continues to propagate, grow, and metastasize. And now, America is riddled with a cancerous, malformed notion of truth.

The biggest threat to our nation and our democracy is the continued bastardization of truth and the potential for that strategy to become a framework or playbook for the next power-hungry demagogue.

Truth, Human Nature and the Internet

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Everyone wants to be right.

We humans yearn for validation. Bestowed our moral compass by our parents, teachers, religion, origin of birth, and ultimately our experiences, we move through life; sewing affiliations with those that share our viewpoint, accept our opinions, and smile back at us assuredly.

We live comfortably unchallenged and quite purposefully so. We get our news from either Fox or MSNBC and we surf internet sites that mirror our viewpoints. We drink from a river of information filtered specifically to our tastes and preferences. We rarely stray from our comfort zone.

Sure, liberals and conservatives cross enemy lines occasionally. Every-now-and-then we liberals turn to Fox news or listen to Rush Limbaugh or Glen Beck – but let’s be honest, we do so mainly to validate what we already believe, that Rush is an asshole and that Beck is a deranged mental case. I suspect that conservatives engage in similar excursions, switching from Fox News to give a listen to comrade Chris Mathews, while muttering under their breath what a Communist-Marxist-Pinko-Douche bag he is.

I used to think that free-flowing access to information would somehow lead to less polarization in society; that availability and factualness were cousins in a sense (pretty naive I know). In reality, unrestricted access to information has made us more polarized, more firmly ensconced in ideology, and (it seems to me) less willing to investigate even the possibility that we might be wrong – about anything.

It seems to me that people are more interested in having their feelings validated than searching for substantive truths that might lead them onto unfamiliar shores. And make no mistake, those who create and deliver the content take full advantage of this. Today when faced with information that is contrary to what we hold true, we have a penchant to disregard it, seeking shelter in pools of information that allow us to continue to believe what we believe, and deflect that uncomfortable feeling of cognitive dissonance.

In a way, truth has become a cottage industry –  and we are all the worse for it.