Over the holidays too many years ago, when I was little more than a toddler, I was caught in a baldfaced lie after having exhausted the freshly baked treasures of a kitchen cookie jar. I denied “the truth and the whole truth” by claiming maybe to have only eaten one or two cookies, and not wanting any more than that. That was my version of “alternative facts,” what, left unchecked, we now politely call “disinformation.”
With cookie crumbs dropping from my lips, my old-fashioned mother wasted no time telling me that she wished that I would tell her the truth, that lies smother the truth and that being truthful is important toward “becoming a good person in a good country.” She knew how to get my attention with repetition. But to make certain, as a memory aid, she washed my mouth out with soap. I remember later hearing somebody tell family friends about her at a school board meeting. Apparently, she stood up and threatened to wash somebody’s mouth out there, too. Everybody laughed at the story, but not me.
As we kick off the new year, I’ve thought about her ways of wisdom in the face of the ongoing threat of so many half-truths packaged with untruths, that have become part of the public propaganda of everyday life. I’ve always been grateful for my mother’s admonitions.
