Truth Telling

Maybe the reason much of the public discourse is making me crazy is that there is so much lying. I have been cursed with the habit of truth telling all of my life.  I am not very good at telling others only what they want to hear. I believe my father had much the same attribute. He got away with it better than I, not only because he was a man but also because his tone was so charming and upbeat.

For me it has most of the time served me well in workplace of the professions I have pursued. I recall the father of one of my patients saying to me: "Doc, I know I can trust you because you can't lie worth a damn."

In fairness to myself, I also cherish the friends who feel safe enough to speak truth to me. But my compulsion has created more than one social disaster.

The current really bizarre choices of media and other public presentations in the public arena seem to represent an opposite compulsion; that being solely to achieve maximum emotional impact on the other. This results in a virtually complete disassociation of facts and weight of importance from words and behaviour.

The most basic rules of civility carried to their extreme have created a mythical Disney village where the discourse is scripted by Customer Service or P. R.

I began this note with the notion of laying praise at the feet of those gentle-folk, surviving particularly in the South, who are so finely attuned to the impact their words and style will have on others.  But writing sometimes takes over and, as demonstrated, I instead find myself, if not deploring, at least observing the consequences of too much of that, or maybe just its misuse.

Like everything else there is no substitute for the modulating influence of deep seated genuine respect and affection for others. Those are attributes lost somewhere along the road to profit.