The truth shall set you free

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." – Mark Twain. Or Winston Churchill.

No doubt you’ve seen it when you open your email — it’s always forwarded by the same folks, and it usually starts with a blaring headline like, "You’re not going to BELIEVE this one!!!!"

You open it, thinking, "Oh, I better open it then, maybe it’s a YouTube video of something cool like a dog shooting a rifle while riding on a horse," but you’re sorely disappointed to find that it’s a bit… political… in nature. How can you tell? Why, the first line, of course.

"OBAMA’S MUSLIM CURTAINS SHOW THAT HE IS GUN-HATING ANTICHRIST BENT ON DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA!!!!!!"

It’s all in capitals, and there’s a lot of exclamation points, because these things are exciting!

The subjects can vary, but they’re mostly about things like Jane Fonda beating American prisoners in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, Denzel Washington paying the entire cost of constructing a veterans hospital, or Obama acknowledging on video that he’s not an American citizen. (Surprise!)

Unfortunately, exciting though these stories may be, they’re not true. In fact, most aren’t even based on a kernel of truth and are entirely made up to inflame the passions of the uninformed and hopelessly gullible.

The misinformation hasn’t stopped there. Social media sites have allowed this plague to reach epidemic proportions. Think about it: how many times have you come across a meme of a Founding Father’s portrait with some political slogan plastered across it that has a hundred likes and 20 shares from those who aren’t even sure if what they’re seeing is a real quote?

Allegedly both sides of the political spectrum do this, but in my experience one side is far more willing than the other to reconstruct history via internet, and they are rarely called on it. It’s as if with the advent of the search engine, all source material has been burned, and all we have left is brainyquote.com. I’m not sure people understand how truly dangerous this sort of thing is, in that Orwellian "who controls the past, controls the future" kind of way. 

Think for a second what the power to attach your chosen phrase to anyone in history actually does — is there any more valuable tool in persuasive speaking?

Concise, witty quotes that prove a point while giving little room for retort are priceless when it comes to swaying opinions. In advertising they become catchphrases, in presidential debates, "zingers," and one need look no further than our own history to find examples of how small, quotable treatises like "Common Sense" and "The American Crisis" influenced the political discourse of the time and, by consequence, the history of the world.

That history, like a shadow dancing on the wall, is hard enough to grasp as it is because it’s cast by a candle that can be filtered and manipulated to serve this purpose or that. But if it can be blatantly rewritten like the ending of poorly done sitcom — and if we actually encourage its rewriting — how can we ever know who we are?

Think of it like this: everything we are as individuals is based on where we’re from and how we came up. It’s what our parents were like, what neighborhood we lived in, who our friends were, and what we’ve been through that shapes our personalities and, by proxy, our future. 

The nation itself is no different. The storms we’ve come through shine the light on where we are headed as a people, and to selectively change our back story is to rob the ship of its rudder.

So next time some asinine e-mail with a headline caterwauling about something that seems too ridiculous (or too good) to be true comes your way, take a second to do a little research before you hit "forward" or "share."

Go to snopes.com, or factcheck.org, type in what you just read, and see if it’s as real as the writer wants you to think it is. Consider it your civic duty, and a personal favor to all of history.

More often than not, you will be surprised what you learn.

And when in doubt, remember Abraham Lincoln’s words of wisdom: "90 percent of what you read on the Internet is BS."

Email: janoski@northjersey.com

New Jersey's reason to believe

It was long after midnight that I came upon him, sitting in the dunes of the Seaside Heights beach, wearing the flannel jacket I’d let him borrow some time during the infamous occasion known to high school seniors as "prom weekend."

He was (and is) one of my closest friends, and we had gone down the Shore to celebrate the ultimate mile-marker of freedom that was graduation.

As expected, the three-day party had gotten way out of hand, and ironically both of us had sought quiet respite by the ocean for that final night. Although I can’t remember what we talked about, we lingered on that sand for hours, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and staring out at the surf that lends a raucous soundtrack to every minute of every day down there.

Ten years later, in the wake of the most ferocious storm in state history, Governor Christie said it best: that Shore of our youth, with the memories of so many lazy days and long, wild New Jersey nights, is now gone.

The boardwalk has been annihilated, the amusement-park rides lay in cold, watery ruin, and the dancing carnival lights have been extinguished.

It didn't stop there, of course. The destruction isn’t limited to that lovely stretch of coastline, and even those of us who have sat on mile-long gas lines only to return to homes that lack heat, electricity, water, or phones are lucky when compared with those whose houses were destroyed by the thousands of trees felled by Sandy’s wrath.

Bad though it may be, the shock is wearing off. It’s time to remember that all is not lost and that the comments from individuals hinting that although the Shore will be rebuilt, it "will never be the same," simply have no place here.

We must remember, always remember, that we are from New Jersey. Yes, we may be bloodied and bruised, but then again, we’re used to that. We live in the shadow of the most spectacular city on earth, and we are the eternal pariahs because of it. While New York has always sparkled and gleamed, we grew up in that dark jungleland across the river filled with the outcasts and broken heroes.

Our rough-and-tumble cities, lying under highways and lit by flickering street lights, are ridiculed, our accents are (inaccurately) mocked, and the ever-unfunny "What exit?" joke is constantly uttered by the lips of the idiotic, but still we endure, because all those years of abuse have infused in us a distinctive fighting spirit that lets us face down any challenge, great or small, all the while saying with bared teeth, "Go ahead. Try it."

Yeah, we know that the Shore was never the cleanest, or nicest, or most refined set of beaches in the country, but then we’ve never been the cleanest, nicest, or most refined set of people.

We’ve had that chip on our shoulder since the start, and our darlings, from Jim Braddock and Frank Sinatra to Bruce Willis and The Boss, have always been the underdogs, the mavericks, the ones who were never supposed to win but did anyway — and did it with style.

There are few states as mangled, but as tenacious and gritty, as New Jersey, and few places whose citizens will never stop the fight even when it seems the bleeding just won’t stop.

Make no mistake: we will need to muster every bit of that grit, every drop of resolve, to recover from this, but we must remember who we are and where we come from. Although our homes may be buried under sand and trees and water, we will get up off the pavement once again, as we always have, in spite of the world’s best efforts to lay us low.

Long ago, while facing a different sort of calamity, Winston Churchill famously said, "If you’re going through hell, keep going." Seventy years later, and it doesn’t matter whether that hell is standing alone against the perpetual darkness of fascism, or rebuilding your shattered life in the wake of a natural disaster, we must keep going.

There is no question that we will rebuild, or that New Jersey, like Great Britain, will prove that the most desperate moments in our hardscrabble lives often lead to our finest hours and greatest triumphs.

We will be back. We will be better. And you can count on it.

http://www.northjersey.com/news/177802661_New_Jersey_s_reason_to_believe.html