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" Live out of your imagination

not your history "

Stephen R. Covey

Am I imagining this?

February 15th, 2017

A crevasse. Not quite as bad as an abyss…

There’s plenty about Trump and the weirdness of what is happening right now – and there’s only so much of this anyone can take on board. But I can’t resist sharing with you this excellent short piece from the New York Times, entitled ‘Am I Imagining this?’ which sums up in four words what I think many of us feel. Here’s a sample:

“Velocity trumps veracity. That is the puzzle and the menace of our age.

Speed and disruption have more psychological impact than truth and science. They shape the discourse. The debunking of a fake news story is seldom as powerful as the story itself. Trump says “X.” Uproar! Hordes of journalists scurry to disprove “X.” He moves on, never to mention it again, or claims that he did not say it, or insists that what he really said was “Y.”

People begin to wonder: Am I imagining this? They feel that some infernal mechanism has taken hold and is dragging them toward an abyss….   read more

3 Responses to “Am I imagining this?”

  1. As Joseph Goebbel’s (Hitler’s Propaganda Minister) said, “A lie told once remains a lie. A lie told a thousand times becomes the truth”. However!! in our contemporary society, the Trump band has a “friend” in the media…newspaper, TV, Youtube, radio, facebook, Twitter, etc…(all media) in that a lie told by them once, gets broadcast millions of times, and everyone else but the administration seems to have become the way the lie gets told a “thousand times” and we are all playing into their hands to reshape our unthinking, unexamining human populace into zombies of the highest order. But this didn’t begin with Trump. I remember, George Bush telling us to go shop after 9/11 to prove that we were not conquered by fear of the terrorists. And then the government set up all kinds of ways to take away our personal freedoms. And…Mr. Obama, drones, and more of the last 8 years have helped pave the way for where we are now. Trump and his ilk are just cruder.

    As one philosopher has said….the unexamined life is not worth living. We need constantly, to examine our lives, our society, our world, to create a more just society for all, not just for the select few at the top.

    • Thank you Mark. I agree: “Trump and his ilk are just cruder”. There’s also another thing going on I think. We hate hypocrites more than we hate liars. So Trump has the odd ability to convey the impression of being open and authentic, as if to say “I’m lying, but so what? At least I’m honest!” An interesting sort of double-bind!

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