Truth

             An honest witness tells the truth, but a false witness tells lies. (Proverbs 12:17)

Use honest scales and honest weights, an honest ephah and an honest hin. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt. (Leviticus 19:26)

There’s quite a bit being said about Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s tale of terror of January 6, 2021. She was in an office in a building that was not attacked. Granted, it could have been. She hid in the bathroom and heard someone repeatedly saying, “Where is she?” It turns out it was the police, trying to find her to make sure she was OK. She went next door to another representative’s office, and that representative apparently didn’t have nearly the anxiety about the situation that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez did. The press shared the story in all its glory, only to find out later that the details weren’t as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. Now the press is saying that if she believed it was all true, then she wasn’t lying.

And the press is correct. If she thought all of this was happening at the time, she wasn’t lying. It’s sort of like the cop who believes that the perp he shot had a gun. Or the guy who says he didn’t rape the girl because his definition of rape is something different. Or the person of a minority group who is afraid of what the white person might do to him/her. But, that doesn’t mean that Representative Ocasio-Cortez was actually in danger, or the perp actually had a gun, or the guy didn’t rape the girl, or the member of the minority actually needed to fear the white person.

It’s like the monster under the bed or in the closet. Yes, the child is actually afraid, and we need to deal with that fear, but part of dealing with that fear is teaching the child not to be afraid when there is no danger. We wouldn’t think highly of a mother who called 911 every night to have the police come to investigate the monster under her child’s bed.

When we are frightened by something that turns out to be a misunderstanding on our part, generally speaking, we either keep our mouths shut so no one finds out, or we make a joke about it.  If someone doubles down on their fear, and turns it into paranoia, we aren’t generally patted on the shoulder and told that we’re correct because we fear. If I were to burst into tears to tell the horrible tale of how I was followed around the park by a Black man, and, when it turned out that he was just walking around the lake in the same direction I was, people would find fault with me if I then proclaimed that some well-known member of the African American community and his pals were out to kill me.

But this is the situation in which we find ourselves. Representative Ocasio-Cortez and her friends are being granted serious consideration for doing and saying things that would earn rebukes and disrespect if a Republican did it. We are being told that we must validate the person by declaring their fears to be valid even when they are not. We are measuring using dishonest scales. In continuing the tale once it has been revealed to be inaccurate, we are lying as witnesses even if we believed we were telling the truth when we started.

And if we are going to validate the person who is afraid, and their fear, we must validate all people who are afraid, and all their fears. That’s justice. That’s using honest scales. That’s being an honest witness. We must either insist on the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, or we must grant to each and every person the “truth” of their errors, fears, and their dictates at the cost of truth.