One of the scars I still carry from childhood came from the people who told me I had to accept things I knew to be lies.
I was a very intelligent and well-read kid. Yes, I could be a know-it-all (some people say I still am) but I thought that was a badge of honor, not an insult. But also, if I was wrong I wanted people to show me the evidence I was wrong, so I could examine it, see where I made a mistake, and then change my mind. I wanted to be right, even if it meant acknowledging that I was previously wrong. In my childish naivety I assumed everyone was the same.
Most people don’t care about being right. They care about pretending they’ve always been right so they don’t have to do the hard work of examining the way they think, or – harder still – questioning their fundamental assumptions about the world and the way it works.
Nobody wanted to show me the evidence they were right, or explain the logic of how they came to their conclusions. They just wanted this know-it-all kid to quit challenging their authority as an adult.
I know this. And I still get angry when people do it.
This is why I dislike Donald Trump so much. It’s not that I disagree with his policies and priorities, although though I do. It’s because he says things that aren’t true, because he wants people to believe them (which is why he still insists he won the 2020 election, even though he knows he lost) or because they want to believe them and he wants their support.
In the end, that’s why he won this year. He told enough people what they wanted to hear and so they voted for him, even though his campaign was built on lies.
Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels most likely did not say this, but it’s still true: “if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.”
I have said – both publicly and privately – that I’m going to do my best to ignore Donald Trump for the next four years. I intend to set my own agenda, to work on the things that are important to me, and to live the way I want to live in spite of him. I’m not a political activist and I’m not going to become one. I’m a Pagan, a polytheist, a Druid, a witch. This is what’s important to me. This is how I’m going to change my little corner of the world.
But I still get angry when people in positions of authority insist that things are true when I know they’re not, when the supporting “evidence” they present is non-existent, and when their logic is “everybody knows” and “it’s just common sense.”
Science shows us over and over again that things can be true in the center and also false on the edges. “There are only two genders” sounds intuitively true for those who only look at the center of the distribution curve, but it’s demonstrably false for a small percentage of people on the edges of that distribution.
So rather than opening their minds, learning something new, and accepting that gender is more complicated than they’ve always been taught, they voted for someone who’s going to make them feel better by trying to make transgender and non-binary people disappear, either legally or literally or both.
Transgender and non-binary people are real, they are who and what they are, and no executive order, legislation, or court ruling can change that.
And also, climate change is real and ignoring it is going to make an already bad situation even worse.
And also, exporting countries don’t pay tariffs. Importing companies do, and they pass those costs along to consumers when they can and they lose profits if they can’t.
And also, the pandemic-driven inflation (inflation = rising prices) is mostly gone, but prices are never going back to pre-pandemic levels and there’s nothing the government can do about it, short of the kind of price controls Republicans abhor… and not without cause. I’m a liberal who gets closer to becoming a socialist with every election, but I know the law of supply and demand can never be repealed.
And also, while immigration is a complicated issue and I have no problem deporting convicted criminals, mass deportations are impractical, inhumane, and will have a negative impact on the economy – especially on food prices.
Just because Donald Trump says it doesn’t mean it’s true (more often, it means the opposite). Just because his sycophants want it to be true doesn’t mean it’s true. And just because he issued an executive order doesn’t make it true.
Which is not to say that executive orders aren’t real. They are, and they can and will cause real harm. Which is their purpose – to hurt the people Trump and his supporters don’t like.
I really do want to stay out of the mud this time and not react every time he does something ignorant and cruel. But when people in authority tell me something is true when I know it’s not, those childhood scars open up and get raw again.
Reality is what is, as it really is. It doesn’t change because you don’t like it, because you’ve always been taught something different, or because you sincerely believe something different. Sometimes reality can be difficult to ascertain, as those of us who work in the realm of religion and spirituality understand, at least if we’re being honest. But when we find it or when we’re confronted with it, our job is to accept it, not to insist that something more convenient and comfortable is true.
So this is where we begin – with a reminder to search for the facts, to learn to spot faulty logic and outright lies, and with a commitment to follow the truth where ever it may lead.
And when necessary, to change reality. Not with Joseph Goebbels’ big lies told many times, but with the skillful application of ordinary effort and magical workings, done consistently and diligently for as long as it takes.
Which will be at least the next four years.
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