A Few "Inconvenient Truths"

Everybody's Free (To Get Pissed & Wear Sunscreen)

NOTE: This post is intended as a starting point and may be updated to include new “truths” as I see fit to add them.

While I don’t “endorse” anyone quoted, their words resonate with me. And sometimes contradict another quote or thought.

The section titles below may be “adversarial” and “binary” but I realize most of life is lived somewhere along a spectrum. Most of which is neither black nor white.

I was today years old when I learned there was a sequel to the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth about Al Gore and his campaign to educate the world about the very real threat of global warming. The film was discussed far and wide and is #13 on Box Office Mojo’s Top Grossing Documentaries.

Released in 2017, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power not only didn’t register on my pop culture radar, it only made a fraction of the box office. But since this we are discussing Hollywood, there’s no guarantee there won’t be another one.

The original film seems to have done some good in the fight against global warming. Much of which has been undone by lobbyists, politicians, and time.

The current mix of entertainment, media, news, and opinion vying for our attention has increased the need for critical thinking and media literacy skills, as well as easy access to mental health help and resources.

On the subject of “inconvenient truths” (many of which may piss you off…thank you, Gloria Steinem) below is a a curated collection of gifs and quotes about some of the subjects currently near and dear to my head and my heart:

AMERICA V. MURICA

“I don't believe in the Constitution because I'm American. I'm American because I believe in the Constitution.”
J.S.B. Morse

“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it, 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
Abraham Lincoln

“It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break; the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.”
Barack Obama

APTITUDE V. ATTITUDE

“We cannot change our past. We can not change the fact that people act in a certain way. We can not change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.”
Charles R. Swindoll

“Artists, musicians, scientists - if you have any kind of visionary aptitude, it's often something that you don't have a choice in. You have to do it.”
Patti Smith

“I came to accept during my freshman year that many of the gaps in my knowledge and understanding were simply limits of class and cultural background, not lack of aptitude or application as I'd feared.”
Sonia Sotomayor

“Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.”
Zig Ziglar

AWAKE V. WOKE

“The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes.”
Thomas Payne

“I don't know the solution, Daniel, but we'll never find it if we're muzzling each other -- or worse -- banishing anyone from outside our social circle who disagrees with us.”
Jay Bell, Out of Time, Into You

“This idea of purity, and you’re never compromised, and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly. The world is messy; there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting, may love their kids and, you know, share certain things with you.

”There is this sense sometimes of: ‘The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough.’

”…That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That is easy to do.”
Barack Obama
Obama Foundation Summit 2019

BEING CRITICAL V. CRITICAL THINKING

“I don't want people to say, 'Something is true because Tyson says it is true.' That's not critical thinking.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson

“How can we have critical thinking without being able to quote and being able to compare what happened in the past? Television is dreadfully unrecorded and unquotable.”
Brewster Kahle

“Doubt as sin. — Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature — is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality

DEI V. STATUS QUO

“We have become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different dreams.”
Jimmy Carter

“The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.”
Anonymous

“I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo. The next time a woman runs, or a black, a Jew, or anyone from a group that the country is 'not ready' to elect to its highest office, I believe that he or she will be taken seriously from the start.”
Shirley Chisholm

“The riskiest thing we can do is just maintain the status quo.”
Bob Iger

CHANGE V. CORRECTIONS

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
Andy Warhol

“The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
Carl Jung

Our culture is just a series of checks and balances. The whole idea that we're in a battle between tyranny and freedom - it's a series of pendulum swings.
Jon Stewart

CIVILITY V. “CULTURE WARS”

“The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none.”
Charles Dickens

“Governments are composed of human beings, and all of the frailties that humans possess are absorbed into these governments and become active within these governments. Hatred, anger, jealousy, fear, greed, distrust and the whole host of afflictions that humans must bear, lurk just beneath the surface of civility displayed by 'government.'“
John McAfee

“Civility, politeness, it's like a cement in a society: binds it together. And when we lose it, then I think we all feel lesser and slightly dirty because of it.”
Jeremy Irons

“Civility is not not saying negative or harsh things. It is not the absence of critical analysis. It is the manner in which we are sharing this territorial freedom of political discussion. If our discourse is yelled and screamed and interrupted and patronized, that's uncivil.”
Richard Dreyfuss

“I have often seen people uncivil by too much civility, and tiresome in their courtesy.”
Michel de Montaigne

COMFORT V. DISCOMFORT

“Too often we... enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
John F. Kennedy

“The purpose of meditation is to make our mind calm and peaceful. If our mind is peaceful, we will be free from worries and mental discomfort, and so we will experience true happiness. But if our mind is not peaceful, we will find it very difficult to be happy, even if we are living in the very best conditions.”
Kelsang Gyatso

“We are a party of innovation. We do not reject our traditions, but we are willing to adapt to changing circumstances, when change we must. We are willing to suffer the discomfort of change in order to achieve a better future.”
Barbara Jordan

The Internet has become my enabler. It keeps me from stillness and discomfort, and this keeps me from growing.
Glennon Doyle Melton

“I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few.”
Brene Brown

FACT V. FICTION

“A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about.”
Woodrow Wilson

“My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer

“We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.”
Bertrand Russell

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
Mark Twain

JARGON V. LANGUAGE

“Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.”
David Ogilvy

“‘Problematic' is one of these meaningless jargon words that people on the internet outrage circles throw at one another.”
Moshe Kasher

“The greatest sin of the academic left is that it has become fundamentally aristocratic, writing in bizarre jargon that makes cliches seem abstruse. If you can't explain your ideal to a fairly intelligent 12-year-old, it's probably your own fault.”
Rutger Bregman

“Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.”
George Packer

“A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

DEMOCRACY V. FASCISM

“The future of this republic is in the hands of the American voter.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower

“When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.”
Brian Eno

“Democracy don’t rule the world, You’d better get that in your head; This world is ruled by violence, But I guess that’s better left unsaid.”
Bob Dylan

When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
Victor Hugo

EDUCATION V. IGNORANCE

“Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”
Malcolm Forbes

FREEDOM OF SPEECH V. FREE THOUGHT

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
First Amendment, The US Constitution

“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
George Washington

"Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage."
Winston Churchill

"Our freedom of speech is freedom or death, we got to fight the powers that be!"
Public Enemy

“Freedom is the oxygen of the soul.”
Moshe Dayan

“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like me, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”
Thomas Paine

GOVERNMENT V. GROUP THINK

“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”
Winston Churchill

“Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.”
Benjamin Disraeli

MAJORITY V. MORALITY

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
Mark Twain

“The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.”
A. A. Milne

“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.”
Oscar Wilde

“A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.”
Socrates

“One man with courage is a majority.”
Thomas Jefferson

“Sometimes the majority just means all the fools are on the same side.”
John Kennedy

ORIGINALITY V. PLAGIARISM

“Originality is undetected plagiarism.”
William Inge

“To engage in downright plagiarism is disappointing. It's cynical, opportunistic and hypocritical.”
Saul Bass

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
C. S. Lewis

“Art is either plagiarism or revolution.”
Paul Gauguin

“I could tell you which writer's rhythms I am imitating. It's not exactly plagiarism, it's falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it.”
Charles Kuralt

“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.”
W. H. Auden

PROPAGANDA V. “TRUTH”

“If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.”
Thomas Sowell

“Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.”
Eric Hoffer

“Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines.”
Hans Haacke

“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”
Buddha

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”
C. S. Lewis

RELIGION V. SCIENCE

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. - Hitchens 3:16”
Christopher Hitchens

“Science is constantly proved all the time. If we take something like any fiction, any holy book, and destroyed it, in a thousand years' time, that wouldn't come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book and every fact and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they'd all be back because all the same tests would be the same result.”
Ricky Gervais

“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.”
Desmond Tutu

“When I do good I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad, and that's my religion.”
Abraham Lincoln

Why did I collect all these GIFss and quotes? Well…the gifs are funny (to mye) and the quotes represent some smart “takes” about things I care about, in ways I’m not quite able to verbalize or write.

The collection sums of some of my personal, sometimes contrarian beliefs.
Human. Like everybody else.

Thanks for reading!
Clint

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