For the duration of our existence our bodies and senses continuously take in a massive storm of information . In a near miraculous 300 milii-seconds or so our personal process sorts out all of it. Most information is assigned to neurological oblivion. Our brain curates only the smallest amount for us to create the conscious event we experience as daily life. One of the greatest tools of this unimaginable sort and selection process that helps determine the quality of our lives is the human ‘story’. We use stories to select from the non-conscious pantry of our minds what is valuable and good as well as what is terrifying and bad. In that selection we build our identity.

Good stories, from consoling to scary, are shared and used to establish common ground. Stories are a form of fiction but oddly enough truth is often only able to be expressed through the creative fiction of story. The fiction comes in because we arrange the facts in a priority that suits our memory, needs and imagination. The difference between a story and a lie is a lie is a story where one consciously deliberately creates facts that are not actually true to mislead for one’s strategic ends. We could call this particular form of lie ‘fact’ion because instead of creating common ground and conveying truth, the lie’s narration is designed to create factions to serve personal needs at the cost of others. Welcome to 2024. 

Some candidates in this election cycle have caused immeasurable harm to various communities and ethnic groups using factional  stolen stories to bolster their broken strategy. They are stealing stories from individuals, communities and the nation. This is often called spinning a story because it is known to the perpetrator be untrue both at the level of fact and the fact’s context. Put simply, its a lie. If one’s child, or employee, or student would be disciplined for such deception it would be sheer hypocrisy to support such behavior in a potential public leader. Your sense of good is not reserved for the privacy of your home, but rather needs to be your public as well as private statement about life. Your children, students community and employees need that from you. I think some people call that fidelity to integrity. Please don’t let anyone steal this nation’s full complex story in their quest for power. Vote for integrity.