It isn't a new concept....

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick
themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
-- Sir Winston Churchill


The word of 2005 according to the Amerian Dialect society, is the one Stephen Colbert used to decribe his Comedy Central show, Truthiness. Not what is true, he explains, but what you feel in your heart Should Be True. Facts? I don't need no stining facts, in other words. But as Churchill points out, people have been seeing exactly what they want to see for years. Lifetimes, even.

I bring this up, after a long, loud conversation with a fourth grader who told me that his goal in life was to join a gang. But he couldn't tell me why, except that he wanted to. The epitome of being led by emotions, but having no clue of what they are and where they are leading him. He said that he was tired of having to listen to everyone at school. But, I asked him, does that mean you'll be in charge of the gang, or do you just want different people telling you what to do? He didn't have an answer for that either. Go figure.

Turth and logic, Fox news aside, are getting rarer and rarer. I can see things in the education system that are in place to help kids understand their feelings, and all that, which is good, because no one at home is teaching them that. But no one is teaching how to think, how to reason out the consequences. How to find out what is truth and what is only truthiness.