The internet enables many things, some of them useful. However, one thing it does, not original with the web, but spread much more quickly and indiscriminately, could be termed “advocacy through innundo;" that is, appearing to say something without saying it at all.  

This was impressed on me this week when I saw a meme that said, “Share if you think that the Pledge of Allegiance should be said in every classroom. Do you agree?”

It seems to be an innocent enough question. I have nothing against saying the Pledge (as we did about every day when I was in school), although I think the argument about the original pledge (“indivisible”), and the McCarthy-era revision (“under God”) is a waste of mental space. However, the meme wasn’t as innocent as I thought. It was shared over 450,000 times and garnered thousands of comments.

It quickly went from “is it a good thing to say the Pledge” to “How dare Obama prevent our children from saying the Pledge.” The vitriol fairly gushed out of the comments section with only the occasional “stay calm and deal with the truth,” the truth being that the Pledge is still said in school classrooms and that a few children are exempted from having to say it, generally on religious grounds.

I don’t think it’s especially cynical of me to think that this is the reaction that the rabble rousers had in mind when they posted the meme, an uprising of the uninformed and generally angry. For some reason, it’s to their advantage to keep the pot boiling and the populace unaware of the real problems that face our country.

The recent presidential election was full of this advocacy through innuendo. His pumpkinship had a peculiar sentence construction that generally went: some people say that Hillary (fill in your own Hillary slander here). I don’t know.” He suggested it, confirmation bias took over, and suddenly—to those folks who wanted nothing more than their prejudices reinforced—it became fact. It was the world’s largest game of “Gossip.”

It’s difficult to believe that any native English-speaker wouldn’t recognize the lack of authority behind the “some people say” construction, which is even more vague than the more common “they say,” but it’s even more difficult to believe that they hold onto the innuendo-turned-fact even in the face of verified evidence to the contrary.

I’m no stranger to having to deal with the contradictions between what I’m told and what my eyes have seen. I grew up in the south during the 40s and 50s, and we had the Southern Code. It had two rules:

1. The Southern Code didn’t make a lot of sense.

2. That doesn’t matter.

Consequently, I heard that black people were lazy, dirty, and dumb (voiced by white people who needed black people to be lazy, dirty, and dumb to maintain what little position they had). Yet most of the better white homes had black “help” who cooked, took care of the kids, and cleaned the house. I worked in the field alongside blacks who could (and did) outwork me all day long. And I would imagine, given the same advantages I had, any number of them would have been smarter than I was. Some of them probably were even without the advantages.

Early on, I dealt with this as most Southerners did, by accepting it and not worrying about the space between the Code and experience. As I grew a little older, I could recognize the contradictions and decided to accept what I could see as truth.

I didn’t want to be taken for a sucker then, and I don’t want to be taken for a sucker today. Consequently, I refuse to go for the sucker-bait that the memes dangle in front of me.

There was a time when we valued the truth. In fact, if you called someone a liar, you generally had a fight on your hands. We seem to have left that far behind us. We seem to have willingly accepted the judgement of that Jack Nicholson line from “A Few Good Men:” You can’t handle the truth.

I wonder if we are not strong enough or smart enough to demand that people give us the truth, backed with facts, instead of innuendo designed to make masses jump up and do battle with straw men, remaining clueless about the real battles that need to be fought in our country against ignorance; poor education; expensive, but not really effective healthcare; hungry children; the mentally ill on the streets and in the prisons; the disappearing American Dream; and a host of other problems that tarnish the greatness of the United States.

Based on our reactions to the innuendo that we see, we may be well on our way to becoming the dumbest citizenship in the history of the United States. The symptoms are too great to ignore. I only know of two solutions, and I have no idea how effective they might be. The first is to demand the truth, or at least as much of as the speaker knows, keeping in mind that the speaker’s truth may not be the one I want.

The second is simple: Pray for Republic. We’re going to need all the prayers we can put up.