Money speaks! Campaign ads, political party positions, financial help, health care debate, and even local and state elections can be greatly distorted by the rhetoric that money can buy!
Determining what it says and who it says it to is a fine art for those who want to know what their money is really saying.
The loudest voices are usually related to small numbers of people/groups who have a lot of money backing them. Simply turn on the TV and watch the ads that are available. Most of these are not truly informational because they are slanted to vocalize one side of an issue or the other. This is the ploy used by candidates, elected officials, political parties, and special interest groups. Their goal is spread the word…their word to every ear that they can. They trust that people will accept what is said because of who they have doing the talking or by some logo or name affiliated with their ’cause’. They trust that people will trust them to give the truth. Well, they do give the truth, but as my mother always said “There are 3 sides to every story. Yours, mine, and the ‘truth’.”
You see, truth is not that easy to identify. What is ‘truth’ to one person can be an absolute lie to another. I personally use some specific subsets of truth when I am looking at a situation. First, I look at ‘reactive truth’. This is where something is going on that has a direct effect on me right now and I have an immediate ‘gut’ reaction to it. In essence, it is emotion driven. Second, there is ‘relative truth’ which is where I calm down a bit and look at what has been said and process that information based on what I have found through life experiences such as listening to others, reading, experiencing, etc. This tends to be more of a cognitive assessment of the truth. Then, lastly, there is a synthesis truth where I look at my emotional reactions and compare them to the data (facts) in an effort to determine whether my reactions are, indeed, based upon facts or whether someone has simply tried to use fear as a tool to shift my thinking and values. All too often, I find that there has been a fairly blatant attempt by someone to do exactly that, frighten me in order to get me to climb onto their ‘bandwagon’.
Examples of how people’s emotions and fear have been used to distort reality in order to serve the needs of the few are rampant throughout the Health Care Debate. They are also freely flowing in the negative campaign ads that we have seen devolve into ‘mud-slinging’ circuses during recent campaigns.
The problem is that these types of tactics work now and will continue to work so long as people make the assumption that those people in power (whether governmental, financial, or other based) are going to look out for the interest of the people. In order to find that out, people need to care enough about what is happening to be willing to look and think for themselves. Whenever you see an ad that automatically makes you think something negative about someone or something simply stop for a few minutes and ask yourself who will benefit if you let yourself respond to the fear or anger that the ad creates. You may well be surprised at what you begin to see. In particular, dig a bit to see whose money is covering the costs of those ads. That, alone, can be very insightful!
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