Democracy requires Facts
“The lifeblood of a democracy is your ability to understand and act upon a problem once the facts are presented to you,” says the narrator of a 1950s science film in a grainy black and white picture that serves as the opening for “Fed Up!” You must take action in order for a democracy to work.
The problem is that we no longer know what the facts are or who we can trust to give them to us. According to “The New American Webster Dictionary,” a fact is “something known to have occurred or to be true; the quality of being actually.”
This definition is in direct conflict with the idea of spin, wherein facts that would not otherwise be beneficial to a particular person are changed to sound as if they positive rather than negative.
The most recent example of not knowing the facts comes from Paul Ryan and his ability to run a marathon. Instead of saying that the marathon was a long time ago and he couldn’t remember how long it took him to run it, he decided to say that he ran it under three hours.
Ryan’s falsifying of information that clearly has a factual side bespeaks of larger problems in our political arena. When politicians cannot be trusted to give us the truth about their own lives in something as simple as a sporting event, how can we trust them to give us the correct information on the budget, national defense or any other topic?
In order to get the facts and just the facts, ma’am, Americans are going to have to work much harder than they have ever worked before.
Pundits will not deliver facts. Fox News has been denied access to public airwaves by Canada because they are known to lie in their news broadcasts. Opinions are not facts, and it is only through facts, compassionately used, that we can create a better nation.
Going back to the 80s may have been good for Michael J. Fox, but it won’t be good for the U.S. Trickle-down economics did not work for Reagan. It has not worked under the Bush tax cuts that we still have in place and that benefit only the rich. It will not work for Romney and Paul.
This year when you vote, avoid the knee jerk reaction of voting against someone or voting through party loyalty. Instead, find out who is telling the truth most of the time and who is using more spin to make themselves and their party seem better or worse. If someone isn’t faithful in a few things, will they be faithful in many?
This article was originally published at examiner.com.
The problem is that we no longer know what the facts are or who we can trust to give them to us. According to “The New American Webster Dictionary,” a fact is “something known to have occurred or to be true; the quality of being actually.”
This definition is in direct conflict with the idea of spin, wherein facts that would not otherwise be beneficial to a particular person are changed to sound as if they positive rather than negative.
The most recent example of not knowing the facts comes from Paul Ryan and his ability to run a marathon. Instead of saying that the marathon was a long time ago and he couldn’t remember how long it took him to run it, he decided to say that he ran it under three hours.
Ryan’s falsifying of information that clearly has a factual side bespeaks of larger problems in our political arena. When politicians cannot be trusted to give us the truth about their own lives in something as simple as a sporting event, how can we trust them to give us the correct information on the budget, national defense or any other topic?
In order to get the facts and just the facts, ma’am, Americans are going to have to work much harder than they have ever worked before.
Pundits will not deliver facts. Fox News has been denied access to public airwaves by Canada because they are known to lie in their news broadcasts. Opinions are not facts, and it is only through facts, compassionately used, that we can create a better nation.
Going back to the 80s may have been good for Michael J. Fox, but it won’t be good for the U.S. Trickle-down economics did not work for Reagan. It has not worked under the Bush tax cuts that we still have in place and that benefit only the rich. It will not work for Romney and Paul.
This year when you vote, avoid the knee jerk reaction of voting against someone or voting through party loyalty. Instead, find out who is telling the truth most of the time and who is using more spin to make themselves and their party seem better or worse. If someone isn’t faithful in a few things, will they be faithful in many?
This article was originally published at examiner.com.