"Most people don't care if you're telling them the truth or if you're telling them a lie, as long as they're entertained by it." That is a quote by Tom Waits, and I think it is one of the most shallow things I have ever heard.Under most circumstances, I believe that most people really do care if you are telling them the truth or not. Lies are a waste of everybody's time, and I believe no one likes to have their time wasted by someone else. So much of what we hear nowadays are lies. Lies or misinformation. Some people will tell you something believing it is the truth, and yet it was someone else's lie that they are just repeating. Lenin and Hitler both believed that "a lie told often enough becomes the truth. Well, Lenin said that actually. Hitler's version was a little more varied. His said "If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed." He also said: "Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it." Sadly, it seems that everyone now believes these mantras. We are lied to by our politicians, we are lied to through advertising, we are lied to through phony studies, and we are lied to through our history books. In fact, it's almost to the point that if you didn't witness an event in person, then you really don't know what happened. The pictures we see, the news casts we watch, all are manipulated to make us believe a story. The stories themselves are often told from one point of view. It's rare that enough information is given to allow us to make up our own minds about an issue. Altering news or pictures isn't new either. It has been going on for decades. There are pictures from the civil war that have been altered to show scenes that never happened and there are pictures from recent political campaigns that have been altered to tell a story. Here is a recent example. This October 2012 National Review magazine cover was altered. "This cover features Barack Obama delivering a speech at the DNC. The cheering crowd waves blue signs saying “ABORTION” when in the original photo the signs read “FORWARD.” BRONX DOCUMENTARY CENTER" That quote is from a Wired magazine article from July 2015. Would the cover have been as powerful a tool for Obama if the signs were left saying Forward. I think you know the answer to that. Abortion is a controversial issue and many democrats support it. So what is wrong with all this lying? Well, the way our memories work, we will remember these images and recall them later and believe them as truth. It must be true, I saw it on the cover of the national review! How many lies have we all seen and did not recognize as being untrue? How many things have we read, that we now believe are true, that are not true? It's bad enough when it is the media doing this to us, but how about when we do it to each other? How many times have one of your friends or loved ones lied to you and you were unaware. Lying seems to be part of the culture now. I have had people look me straight in the eye and lie to me, not knowing that I had observed what had happened. It is sickening, Can we no longer trust our friends and families? I guess it all comes down to who can you trust? I'd like to think that I can trust my family. How about you?
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