Is Your Cloak of Righteousness a Straight Jacket?

I’ve been watching the Kavanaugh/Blasey Ford shit show with alternating feelings of horror and amusement.

I have no dog in the fight. I am not in a position to make comment one way or another simply because I trust none of the information coming from either camp.

The way this goes I’ve just succeeded in alienating 95% of people who bother to read this.

Good.

That means that I’m not part of your fake reality. I’m comfortable with that. Deal with it.

The truth is the truth. There are only two people on earth who know what the truth is in regard to Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford and neither of them is going to change their story. In fact, it is quite possible that they both believe their version of the truth.

It is what it is.

In “civilised” society we have this inconvenient legal construct called the burden of proof. No amount of protesting, gnashing of teeth or petulant displays from entitled middle class comfortably smug superior “liberals” ( a betrayal of the word if I ever saw one) will change the fact that Blasey Ford’s allegations based on recovered memories had holes that a criminal defence lawyer could drive a fleet load of trucks through.

But the Democrats chose to expose her to the full glare of the media spotlight when offers had been made for her to make her testimony in camera. Why did they do that?

Could it be that they don’t give a frog’s fractured foreleg about her emotional well being and that they simply wanted to block Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment at any cost?

And as for the Republican side of things – their now busy making hay with a supporter base that is convinced that the whole deal was a complete fit up with the one aim of stopping Kavanaugh at any cost.

America has split down the middle on an issue that, if, handled sensitively by either side would have been treated with dignity, common sense and respect for both parties -fat chance of that happening.

In the either/or world that many of us have been duped into living in you must condemn and despise one party or the other.

How fucking wonderful.

Now, I think I know what you’re thinking – if only the other side would see reason.

You have all the facts – why does the other side choose to ignore them?

It’s simple really. It depends upon what facts you possess.

Facts shape our reality.

When we selectively choose facts or are selectively fed facts our truth is shaped accordingly.

Many years ago, I had a semi-coherent argument with some close friends of mine, where I tried to make the point that any news agency anywhere shapes our perception of the truth. They do this by selectively reporting facts that suit their or the government’s agenda.

I forgot all about that discussion until I watched the amazing race for the Democrat Party nomination. Blind Freddy could see the brazen manipulation of the voting system by the DNC. But mainstream media refused to report on it. It wasn’t happening and anyone who dared raise the possibility of vote rigging was immediately cast as a conspiracy theorist, a kook and a sore loser.

And yet, the DNC emails told us a different story and investigative journalists like Greg Palast clearly demonstrated that widespread vote rigging was being undertaken.

Once you see the initial lie, you keep finding more and pretty soon, you lose all faith in people giving you what quite clearly are at best, distortions of the truth

When you get to that stage, you start going looking for your own answers.

That’s hard work but the truth is never easy.

We can’t rely upon one source, nor can we look for the truth within our carefully crafted cocoons of false reality that social media allow us to create.

We can’t rely upon journalists who simply parrot the government’s or a particular political party’s statement as gospel truth.

We must open our minds to all possibilities and we must seek answers in places that we may not like.

Mainstream media is not the answer.

Nor are trendy leaders of the resistance who just parrot DNC talking points.

Nor are the MAGA people who will accept anything from the President because he’s “their guy.”

Nor is the hysterical Alex Jones or any other talk show host with all the answers.

They are all worth hearing because they all have small elements of truth hidden within their dogma but none of them will tell you the whole truth.

We have to dig. We have to research and we have to continually ask what, where, how, who and most importantly, why.

If we don’t we can cloak ourselves in our artificial version of righteous reality and follow the baying mob into an Orwellian Hell where free speech is not even a concept or reality.

The shit show that was Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh leads me to think that the Orwellian Hell is much closer than I care to think about.