I’m so sick and tired of people – especially the extremists – insisting that they deserve the freedom to say whatever they please, regardless of the consequences. And I’m particularly angry at people, particularly the far right, who insist that they have the “right” to lie, to reject verified facts, or to present facts in a misleading context. The fact is, as illustrated by the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, that lies and distortions undermine social order and can lead to injury and death.

This isn’t anything new. The idea of a peaceful ante-bellum south was also always a lie. The pre-war southern political power structure continually feared a slave revolt, and the oppression and physical abuse of slaves has been well-documented. Even the “gallant” Robert E. Lee is documented to have beaten a slave.

The 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy vs. Ferguson that “separate but equal” was acceptable was a lie, because the white power structure had no intent whatsoever in providing “equal” access or facilities, and when black communities managed to create prosperity, all too often white vigilantes tore them down and terrorized and/or killed blacks who had the temerity rise toward equality.

When the last election showed that minorities were getting close to equal rights to vote, what happened? Republicans in state after state immediately pushed, and often passed, legislation that makes it harder for those in less affluent communities to vote. And they’re justifying it with the lie of almost non-existent “voter fraud.” Even the far-right Heritage Foundation’s vaunted study on voter fraud could only find a handful of individual cases in over twenty years of federal elections.

Trump and his supporters are pushing for the legal right to lie under the guise of free speech and the idea that they have the right to lie and distort and to use public media to do so

The problem is, of course, is that the unscrupulous and corrupt will use any tool to obtain power and to maintain that power. Those who are honest and law-abiding don’t want to restrict free speech, but without a government check on unregulated freedom of speech in a high-tech mass communications society, it’s beginning to appear that the lies will eventually prevail. Yet if government has the power to stop the lies, whoever controls the government will eventually control the people.

The only way to stop the loss of real freedom is for people, both as individuals and in groups, to reject the lies and insist on “all the facts, all the time.” The facts, all the facts. Not what you believe, not what you want, but the facts.

Unfortunately, too many Americans are more vested in believing comforting lies espoused by the leaders of their “tribes,” rather than in looking for a truth based on facts. To maintain freedom requires the strength to face the facts, both when they’re comforting and when they’re not. Insisting on comforting lies has always led to authoritarian rulers and loss of freedom.

The “cancel culture” is close to being out of control – or maybe it is already. On the one side, there is an extreme left that sees the current socio-economic structure and culture as fatally flawed and that takes even slight lapses and misunderstandings as intentional slights or attacks, and on the right, a mass of conservatives who insist that everything is just fine the way it is and that, even if it’s not, the extreme leftists are taking things far too far.

What I’ve noticed repeatedly is how often matters are taken out of context. For example, a performing arts instructor who had worked with a student for more than three years, giving that student additional instruction, alerting the student to opportunities and funding, and going the extra mile, wrote the student an email to point out that the student had showed a considerable lack of courtesy and respect in handling a situation, adding a note that such behavior would hurt the student if repeated in professional situations because the performing arts community can be a very small world at times. The student ended up filing a grievance that almost resulted in the instructor being dismissed. The instructor was trying to be helpful, alerting the student to an unprofessional behavior, nothing more, but because of the ultra-sensitivity of the words along the lines of “it’s a small world,” the administration panicked. That situation was far different from the ones where Harvey Weinstein used those words to threaten young actresses not to report his physical assaults.

Instances like those of the instructor are far from rare and are getting more and frequent, and I suspect it’s because the “cancel culture” is far too focused on “forbidden” buzzwords than on evaluating words and phrases in their context, and, from what I’ve observed, often too little attention is paid to actions that indicate that the speaker certainly meant neither offense nor harm.

Likewise, conservatives have little or no understanding of the pain that lies behind the use of various phrases that anger the left, because they don’t or can’t understand the context in which those words and phrases were used, both in the past and at times still in the present.

All too often context is everything, but the shouts are so loud that context is lost.

Life is messy. People are complex, and it’s always been that way.

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and was an untiring champion of religious freedom, but he was also a slave holder and made a slave who was a half sister to his deceased wife his mistress.

Abraham Lincoln fought the Civil War to preserve the United States and wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, but never believed blacks to be the equal of whites.

Martin Luther King fought valiantly and effectively for equal rights, but was an incorrigible womanizer.

Charles Lindbergh was the first man to fly the Atlantic solo and an aviation pioneer, who risked his life in WWII to improve combat flight operations; he was also an America-first isolationist, closet Nazi supporter, and a bigamist.

Richard Wagner was a great composer, but also an avowed anti-Semite who seduced the wife of his greatest financial supporter.

Almost invariably, people want to believe that people of great achievements were better individuals than they actually were, and now, when history and scholarship reveal the full scope of their lives, there’s a growing movement to destroy statues and monuments and to denigrate important historical figures because they weren’t perfect.

Some of this backlash is understandable and justifiable. I can see why the descendants of slaves, in particular, would want monuments glorifying figures of the Confederacy destroyed, but trying to erase or change the view of history only makes it more likely that the evils will reoccur. In a sense, that’s exactly what happened in much of the American south, when in the post-Reconstruction period, southern whites papered over the evils of slavery and erected monuments to the “valiant” soldiers of the Confederacy, so effectively that for generations to follow the southern “story” was of lost glory, the destruction of states’ rights, and Yankee carpetbaggers, rather than the real story, which was the destruction of a socio-economic system based on dehumanization and oppression.

But there’s a difference between removing “propaganda” statues and monuments and removing those who made a difference in history. Removing statues of Lincoln or Jefferson because they weren’t “pure” ignores the basic fact that none of us are. Like it or not, the military ability of Robert E. Lee made an awful difference in prolonging the Civil War, but those abilities are part of history.

The preservation of some of the Nazi death camps helps keep alive a reminder of just how evil governments can become if people allow it. When the history of evil is buried – or white-washed – it becomes so much easier for subsequent generations to repeat those evils, as it was in the American south, if on a lesser scale.

As always, balance is vital.

When we added several rooms and a new garage to one end of the house some six years ago, we had to remove a struggling and bedraggled lilac bush, but we planted five to replace it, hoping to have more lilac blooms. Both my wife and I love lilacs, but while lilacs thrive in Cedar City, what happens to their fragrant spring blooms is another matter. Over the last 27 years, we’ve been able to actually smell the lilacs perhaps four times.

That’s because Cedar City, at any time of year, is subject to violent and severe changes of temperature. The year we constructed the addition, on Friday, two days before Mothers’ Day, the contractor removed the old garage, turned off the gas line [because it crossed the excavation zone] and “sealed” off the end of the house with heavy plastic. The daytime high was in the low seventies, and the low in the low forties. Nothing unusual was forecast.

On Saturday night the temperature dropped to around twenty degrees [F], the wind picked up to 30 mph, and the snow began to fall. By Sunday morning, Cedar City had between thirteen to twenty inches of snow. We live on a hill on the west side of town. Guess which end of the snowfall we got. The effect on the already leafed out trees and much of the rest of the town was predictable. Not only did we have no gas for the gas furnace, but we had no electricity for the alternatives.

Fortunately, on the lower level of the house, we do have a very reliable Vermont Castings wood-fired stove, which kept the lower level very toasty and the upper level well above freezing for the next two days. By Tuesday, the day-time temperature was back into the low seventies and the nighttime low into the high forties.

As I write this, the daily highs have been in the high sixties [F] and the lows just above freezing, but last week for several days the lows were in the twenties. Those sixty-plus degree days have encouraged the lilacs to leaf out and the buds look ready to flower in the next few days.

Freezing temperatures aren’t in the forecast… but neither was the Mothers’ Day storm. I’m still hoping to be able to smell the lilacs this year.

Now that the end of the current American school year is nearing, at least for those in more traditional schools, colleges, and universities, I got to thinking even more about learning and education. I say “even more,” because I’ve always thought about both, and I can’t escape it, not with a wife who is a university professor, and two offspring who teach law and medicine, and that doesn’t include the three years I taught on the collegiate level.

Despite the fact that study after study has shown, year after year, that while cramming may get a student through the dreaded final exams, the vast majority of students retain little of what they’ve crammed. Knowledge learned and used bit by bit is retained with far greater detail. That’s why good apprenticeship programs work.

But students crammed when I was in college and they still do. When I was teaching, I gave “pop quizzes” at the beginning of every class, and the questions were either fill in the blank or short answer about important “secondary” material in the reading assignment, i.e., material that wasn’t covered by the equivalent of Cliff Notes or other cheat sheets, material that was easy enough to recall if a student read the material but not available in any other way. I made a point of calling on all students by name in the course of class discussion, especially those who didn’t look interested. I also always had a few students drop out in the first week.

Was that mean or sadistic? It wasn’t meant to be. The idea was simple. Even back then a large percentage of students were there for credentials, not an education. The way I taught was designed to make sure they retained and understood at least a portion of what they read.

Today, from what I see and from what I hear from a large range of teachers at various levels, far too many students want to be spoon-fed the answers that will be on tests. They demand to know what will be on the test. And teachers are under incredible pressure to teach to the test and to get everyone through.

Back in the ancient days, we understood that no test could cover everything a student was supposed to have learned, and that the test was used as a sampling device. That was why tests were changed from semester to semester. It was also why enterprising students tried to gather questions from past tests in order to game the system.

These days, even when students know the facts, they have great difficulty in synthesizing and analyzing what those facts mean and how they apply in a particular discipline.

And that’s what you get when the emphasis is on getting everyone through with a credential rather than on learning the material and being able to explain it and apply it in ways that you weren’t ever taught.