For those of you in the know, my title is the first half of a famous quote often attributed to George Orwell: In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act. And there is no question we live in a time of universal deceit, one that all our technological advances in communications has empowered and, to use a term popular among a certain crowd, "weaponized."

But those same technologies also make it possible to fight the constant river of lies that assault us every day, threatening to drown us into submission and meek compliance to the whims, greed and evil of the powers that be, also allows us to speak the truth, and to transmit that truth across not only vast distances, but over an even wider chasm, the differences in the minds of those we may never meet. That is, we can reach out to people who believe different things things than we do, live different lives than we do, have different ideas and thoughts than we do. Yet, despite those differences it is still possible to reach one another with our truths, for the truth speaks to the sadness, suffering and sorrows we all face on this earth, and the same joys, happiness and delights we all feel as fellow human beings.

And when those truths are told, and communicated and people come to trust what we show them, and we begin to trust what they show us, dialogue begins, and the potential arises to overcome the chains that have been laid upon all of us by those obsessed with power over others.

Chains that keep us from seeing that the starving woman in Sudan, fearful of marauding bands of evil men determined to kill her, is not that different from the abused and battered woman in Ohio, fearing tonight is the night a crazy man decides to kill her with his gun or perhaps his bare hands. Chains that keep us from feeling empathy and understanding for the child soldier in the Congo, torn from his parents, his home and pushed into a life of killing as much as we fail to feel empathy and understanding for the child living in the slums of Detroit, pushed into a shallow life of pursuing whatever comfort - often only drugs and sex and the adrenaline rush of doing harm to others - that he or she can find in the bosom of a local gang until death or prison comes. That keeps us from seeing the pain of the white working man or woman, barely getting by on Dickensian wages , or unemployed, hiding from their pain by losing themselves in opioids, meth and alcohol, are not that different from the pain of young men and women in Pakistan training to be martyrs, training tom kill themselves and others in order to find some bare meaning in lives that this world treats as worthless.

Telling the truth does set you free, not by giving you the power of wealth and fame that provides only a facade of freedom, but freedom from the lies, and the freedom to know, deep in our souls, for we do have souls however you define that term, that all human beings, and indeed, all life has value, and as Sam Gamgee (my daughter's personal favorite literary hero) once said, words truer than any I could invent: There's some good in this world, Mr Frodo... And it's worth fighting for."

And with that I leave you with a tribute by David Bowie to his fellow musician, poet and philosopher, John Lennon, where he sings my favorite John Lennon song: Imagine

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSx3uT9cJ04]