This Rock Is A Fact

Accept it.

This is a rock.

It looks like two giant rocks, but it’s actually two tips of a giant rock that juts out into the Pacific Ocean. It’s known as Sisters Rock, located about eleven miles south of Port Orford, Oregon, on Highway 101. I know this because I took the photo with the same Apple iPhone I use for my job.

These are all facts.  Reality.  You can check out the rock on Google Maps, and somewhere in the metadata of the photo itself, you will find the GPS coordinates, the date taken, and what device was used.

Facts.

I would like to use this beautiful scenery as an example of how we can climb out of this chaos from which we are currently stewing.

A rock, you say?  What does that have to do with culture wars or human rights?  Almost nothing.  But it is a place to start.  A single image.  A fact.

Somewhere along the line, maybe in the 1990’s or so, we began to confuse belief and fact.  We’d managed to balance these two very important things, but the delicate wall that kept them separate was pierced by those who wished to profit from the ensuing madness that mixing the two would bring.

Belief is belief.  Fact is fact.

Beliefs do not need to be proven. Facts do.  Beliefs do not need to hold up in court or survive under scientific scrutiny. Facts do.  If they do not, they aren’t facts.

Normally beliefs were from our religions and traditions.  Beliefs in God or morals or rites or ceremonies or a host of other things.  No need to prove them right.  It’s your private business.  Your belief. Those really aren’t the beliefs I’m talking about.  Not really.  Your belief in God isn’t an issue.  It’s whatever mental offramp that was taken to think that Democrats are spawns of the devil, or that the Clintons were child enslavers, or that we somehow have a belief system that aligns with millionaire businessmen instead of our own neighbors.

You see this difference?  God is the belief.  Sacred.  Holy.  Personal.  Those other things are not.  They are propagated as fact and they are simply not.

I know, I know.  The media.  Most of our media is profit-driven and chaos sells.  We all know this.  (Or we should.)  But it takes two parties to spread bullshit.  The media will stop creating fake narratives and downplaying important issues when we stop listening.  I’m just not into blaming others.

We are in charge. We choose to be lied to.  We choose the cushioning blow of reinforced belief than the harsh reality of fact.  We are a soft country who doesn’t like complication.

We have more people that support gun restrictions than those who do not.  We have more people who support abortion rights than those who do not.  Our healthcare system is perhaps the worst in the world for a country our size, and embarrassingly bad for a country as wealthy. Facts.  There are polls that are analyzed and cross-referenced over and over again that support these claims, as well as documentations that supports the facts. 

They can be proven.  If they can’t, they are not facts. 

Before I get completely off-topic, I have to get back to the rock.

The new thing we have discovered, is that for American at least, belief has wormed its way into fact.  How?  Well, now we’ve started dismissing facts based on nothing at all.  The speaker, the newspaper the channel, the researcher.  Now we are in a place where facts themselves have to be believed. 

Remember: Fact doesn’t need belief. Belief does not need fact.  Those are two tenets that must remain.

We know why.  Lies to get people elected, lies to spread fear, callus lies to make more money.  Nothing new.  I think this issue is that we must separate these two in a much more vocal and permanent fashion.

You see, this isn’t about the rock.  It’s a photo of the rock.  I am asking you to take this as a fact.  I’m not asking you to believe the fact, I’m asking that you take the logical steps necessary to accepting that this is, indeed, a big-ass rock on the Oregon coast.

First, why would I lie?  What would I have to gain?  It’s easy to research and debunk.  Maybe you have doubts that I’m the one that took the photo, or that maybe it’s a rock, just not the one I clamed it was.  Again, what would the point be?

After doing that, and short of actually traveling to Oregon to see it for yourself, you can accept it as fact.  Just like you accepted that Lincoln was the sixteenth president, the three interior angles of a triangle will always add up to 180, or that the moon’s gravitational pull has an effect on tides. You didn’t research these things.  You didn’t believe them.  You ACCEPTED facts from a reliable source. 

Like me and my rock photo.

We used to call this critical thinking.  It’s been perverted by kooks and charlatans with axes to grind, but it’s still out there. 

The internet is all lies.  It’s not.  There are trusted sources.  They aren’t hard to find.

The media lies to make money and journalism is dead.  It’s not.  Media has always been for-profit but there are still dedicated professionals who relay fact.

The government is a bunch of evil crooks. You mean the 3 million people who work for the federal government or the twenty million on the state and local level? 23 million crooks?  The crooks are easy to find.  They usually are in an elected office, not in a desk at the Treasury Department.

I guess if I had one wish for the American people right now, it would be to make sure to reserve your anger for things that actually exist.  Don’t hate your neighbor because you believe that he believes something you disagree with.  Let’s at least get that down. Maybe less generalization. 

I could go on forever.  Probably shouldn’t have gone this far.  But I still commit to my photo of Sisters Rock. It is a fact.  Use it as a baseline the next time you spin out of control at something on the news.

Is this a fact or an opinion?

Does one instance mean a pattern or an isolated occurrence? (I claimed this one rock, not rocks along every coastline around the world.)

Is there anything to gain?

Is it a reliable source?  (This one will take practice.  Maybe start with news outlets outside of America who simply relay facts.  Then you can narrow down the more reliable US outlets.  And there are some.)

I believe that this quiets the noise and revels the real problems.

The rock is all I have.  This is the best metaphor I could come up with.  This blog thing is all over the place and it’s all because I can’t concisely relay how I cope. So, I used a rock.  At least its nice to look at.