Photo credit: Pablo Garcia

Slowly but surely, there has been a degradation of credibility in the words we use.  I fondly remember a time when we said something to our family, friends, and even most strangers, unless one was a pathological liar, in which we could expect the truth to be spoken.  White lies do not count, as those were meant for the receiver’s benefit.

Welcome to the 2016

“Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, children of all ages, come into the circus, hear the music, laugh at the clowns, be thrilled by the perilous leaps of the acrobats, marvel at everything the performers do…only at the circus.”

Ah yes.  Didn’t P.T. Barnum say “there is another sucker born every minute?”  Who would ever think a person who would peddle clowns, giraffes, lions, elephants and cotton candy could come up with a saying so profound to stand the test of time!  It’s as if he was expecting our 45th president to arrive for the sole purpose to entertain (and scare) all the “boy and girls.’  And yes he is!

Some people say his policies are scary.  Others say his ideology is bigoted and a throw back to a time when it was great for ‘the selective few.’  I say he’s scary because he single-handedly changed the value of the words we say.  It only took numerous rallies, lies every 3.13 minutes, and the depth of knowledge of crude oil floating on the oceans top layer polluting the world to normalize the “Art of the lie.”

Frankly, I do not know what he believes.  If he really believes everything he says, he could be worse than Hitler!  Now since I know (and pray) that he is nothing like Hitler, I need to take what he says with a grain of salt.  But why?

Honest communicating is not a poker game, especially when you are going to be the leader of the free world and Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful fighting force on Earth.  Words in that position matter more than anything! If we are now saying that a used car salesmen, slip and fall accident lawyers, and kids who talk their way out of admitting they never took the last home cooked chocolate chip cookie out of the jar are more honest than the future President of the United States, we are in for 4 years of guesswork and anti-democratic policies.

Quick word association folks:

1. Democracy – Noble and honest.
2. Freedom of Speech – Clear communication of your ideas without a filter.

Now, try these word associations:

1. Authoritarians – liars
2. Dictators – A constant stream of misinformation to quell the public like pigs to the slaughter-house.
3. Conflicts of Interest – Spinning words which never had any credible meaning until this year to chip away at the most important ethical standard of honest and altruistic leaders.

It is ‘not ok’ to lie in your face, as if the people listening can ever accept it.  It is ‘not ok’ to say one thing at the beginning of a sentence and the polar opposite at the end of the sentence.  It is ‘not ok’ to claim you never said something, even though it was captured on video tape which shows you did.  Donald is making Bill Clintons’s nuances of “what is the definition of “is” is seem like first grade three-card-monte lies.  Donald Trump has a doctorate degree in word manipulation and falsehoods.

I did not vote for this President.  I will not say who I voted for since people are foolishly mistaken that it was a binary choice.  One look at the ballot slip showed many candidates before the curtain closed.  However, he is my president and I must support him now for my children’s sake.   I also expect him to be the president for all Americans.  That is how we end our elections (except for the many of the people and GOP who did not vote for Obama and tried to make him part of ‘the other’ people, whatever that racist word meant).

I demand that President Elect Donald Trump (I just did a vomit burp putting those four words together in a congruent sentence, pardon me) use words that are at the very least truthful at the surface level.  I am not putting him to a standard of other politicians who also lie, but not in the magnitude or public display as he does every minute.  I cannot accept a new paradigm in which he is metaphorically sitting to the left of me at a Texas Holdem poker game in Las Vegas and he has a 7-2 off suit, he has his cards ‘face up’ and then tries to tell me that he is sitting with ‘pocket aces!’  Hey, he still might win the hand, but the odds will be that he will lose his bankroll quite quickly or get real lucky and keep drawing a 3-4-5 on the flop.  Both outcomes are not good and the result is that I have no respect for that person whether or not he wins or loses.  He lied in my face and showed no degree of conscience while doing so.

At the end of the game, if I had an upset stomach and needed to find a bathroom, I would go left if he told me to go right.  Do we want to have an entire new language that he means the opposite every time?  Hey, if that was the case Donald, why couldn’t you have simply told me that earlier and you would have had my vote, and the predominant older white males who sung your praise would have your picture on their dart boards at their local pub?  If you meant most everything you said, then walking to Canada on my calloused bare feet would be a rational option right now.

Who are you Donald?  I do not know.  The people who voted for you “think’ they know.  Just wait until you are in power and your words will mean something.  Our last vestige of democratic sanity is that actions will be the real truth and you will finally come out of the clown outfit and be the ringmaster of our lives…for better or worse.  But at least we will decipher your distorted version of words which presently is incomprehensible and offensive to most.

Do you really believe what you say, or are you truly the most talented con man in history?  The downside to constant lies is that the people who are most scared and offended with most things you have said are actually praying that you were lying.  Now that is a very sad commentary of how we speak in our new society.