Save me, Lord,
    from lying lips
    and from deceitful tongues. – Psalm 120:2

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

To all those who are shocked that there a winter storm coming this weekend. Please note that it is in fact winter.

I only point this out in response to the tidal wave of worst-case scenario headlines and maps and “Snowmageddon” references competing for “look at me” readership.

Attention-seeking world:

But this is the world we live in, where we seem to be so desperate for attention, to acquire clicks and likes and hits and shares, that we exhaust all possible five-alarm alerts long before anything actually happens.

We so badly want to be noticed that we resort to just about anything to get people to look our way. Then when they do we often have very little of any substance to say.

What baffles me about all the noise and hyperbole and exaggeration and bluster and falsification and flat-out lying is that it turns out the truth is usually much more interesting. If only we take the trouble to find it.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain:

I visited a movie set once and it looked for all the world like the main street of a town. Colorful signs and flashy window displays invited us into shops, a hotel, a bar, even a church.

Yet if you walk to the end and looked around there is nothing there. It’s all facade with no depth or substance or content.

I am concerned that too many of us live our lives looking at the signs and the windows and the advertisements but we fail to take the trouble to read for content, or look around on the inside.

This is, I believe, very much of a “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” moment in the world right now.

But we have to become more interested in the truth. We have to look beyond the cardboard cutouts and the hype and the strobe lights and the smoke on the stage.

Ask more questions!

We were issued with some pretty good brains when we were born, most of us have gone to school at least through twelfth-grade, and basic research is not that hard of a task if we are even a little bit motivated.

So what is stopping us? Aren’t we tired of the hype, the politics, the deception, the misinformation, the machinations, the conspiracy theories, the headlines that lead nowhere and the facades in front of empty spaces?

Snow storm or snow job – we really need to be more conscientious and discerning consumers of information – DEREK