DETROIT – The Citizens’ Research Council of Michigan is, in my judgment, the state’s best and most respected public policy outfit. They have provided useful and totally non-partisan information on everything from prisons to road repair for more than a century.
Their founder and first director, Lent Upson, a pioneer in modern public administration, used to say something that I think about a lot these days: “The right to criticize government is also an obligation to know what you are talking about.”
Were it up to me, those words would be engraved on stone tablets and plastered on web sites everywhere.
Actually, you could substitute the word “anything” for “government” and have a good general motto — and one I think we may need now, perhaps more than ever. Our politics, and to some extent, our outlook on life are being deeply corroded by lies.
Lies, aided by easily preventable ignorance.
One example: Ever since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of the Gaza strip, there have been protest demonstrations, some on Michigan campuses, featuring masses of people demonstrating for Palestine and the Palestinians, chanting “from the river to the sea.”
Yet when asked by news reporters, few of the chanters knew what river (Jordan) and what sea (Mediterranean) the slogan refers to. Nor did they know that it is seen by many Jews as a code for saying the Palestinians intend to wipe Israel off the map.
That’s not saying that’s what most of those protesting what they see as atrocities committed against Palestinians want. Many just want the killing in Gaza to stop. U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit) who is Palestinian and a severe critic of Israel, says “from the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate.”
That may well be what she means by that.
But there are those who clearly have used the slogan to mean the destruction of Israel, and those chanting “from the river to the sea” need to know its emotionally charged history.
So how are we supposed to know this? Most of us are not experts on Middle Eastern issues. But finding out accurate information has never been easier, largely thanks to the World Wide Web, the innovation that made using the internet easy and practical.
Plus, most of us now have a so-called “smart phone” in our pockets and purses. However, there’s a catch.
Not only does the internet provide access to an incredible amount of information, it also can provide a blinding amount of disinformation, if you don’t acquire some skills at evaluating what you read, what librarians call “media literacy.” About a year ago, a server in a modest restaurant in Ypsilanti told me she’d had the first Covid vaccination, but wasn’t going to get the booster, because she had read on the internet that “the booster is how they track you.”
I told her that just wasn’t true, but she was sure it was, because “I read that online.” I told her that in the event the deep state was interested in tracking her (which didn’t seem very likely) they could, but by monitoring her smart phone, not her antibodies.
Unfortunately, I didn’t think I convinced her. Getting truthful information is especially crucial now, since we are just beginning a national election campaign which seems likely to be not only one of the nastiest ever, but filled with incredible falsehoods.
So how do you evaluate what you hear? By using a little common sense and doing a little research. Government statistics are nearly always reliable. Established, respected news organizations like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times or The Washington Post occasionally make mistakes, but not often or deliberately.
If Candidate A says inflation is two percent and Candidate B says it’s still nine percent, there are impartial statistics that should be easy to check. If U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown claims he was responsible for getting a certain bill passed, you can check that too.
Sadly, most of us don’t take the time. As Ian Leslie, a British advertising man who became a journalist and an author, said, “I possess a device in my pocket that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers.”
Too true for too many. The other day I had lunch with one of the most impressive people I know: Sam Adler, a world-famous composer who barely escaped Krystallnacht and the Holocaust as a child, and who is still writing music as he approaches his 96th birthday.
Adler, who today lives just south of Toledo, knows, as only a survivor of Nazi Germany can know, how important the truth can be. “I am very worried,” he told me, naming a certain American politician. “He’s got Joseph Goebbels’ technique down perfectly: Just keep telling a big lie over and over until enough people believe it.”
However, we have an advantage that the people Goebbels fooled did not: A far easier ability to find out the truth, if we make the effort.
Our futures, after all, depend on it.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
