America’s trust in her government may be on the cusp of disintegrating!  Crispin Sartwell, a philosophy professor at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. says that “The basic problem isn’t that people don’t trust institutions, but that the institutions aren’t trustworthy.”  Amen to that!  But neither is much of the media.  Or advertisements.  Or churches.  Or schools.

The downward slide toward allowing just a “facade of truth” has been a long one.  Think about it.  As a society, we have decided that truth is relative.  My truth may not be your truth.  But what you believe is equal to what I believe, regardless of whether or not either of our beliefs are true. How crazy is that?

No longer do we delve deep into a subject, searching honestly for the truth of a matter.  It is more important to uphold what is profitable, self-serving, politically expedient, or advantageous.  Lying for the greater good has become a normative behavior.  We lie to avoid hurting others. We lie to sell something.  We lie to avoid exposing our sins.  We lie to cover our previous lies.   You often cannot believe your neighbor or friend or work associate.  So if everyone has become a liar (and there are not little lies and big lies…..just lies), it is of course folly to believe an institution made up of liars.

I live in South Carolina and for days we have been wondering what effects hurricane Florence would have.  Though it was downgraded from a category 4 to a category 2 before landfall, it has certainly been destructive.  For some it has been truly devastating.  Suffering comes in all sorts of ways, but when it comes from something that we have absolutely no control over, it causes its own sort of anxiety.  And hopefully, it provokes deeper thought.

Control over our lives is pretty much an illusion, anyway.  We certainly have the ability to choose different paths.  But our vision of what is down those paths is very limited.  It is often the unexpected, good and bad, that shapes ours lives.  And sometimes what is painful redirects us to a better path.  Years ago, someone wrote “It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn…”