'This isn't the Brexit I voted for' tweeted a man this week who spent 50 minutes-plus at Amsterdam airport, waiting to get his passport checked to enter Holland. 'Longer in the queue than in the air'. He has been (metaphorically) shot down several times by folk replying to his message along the lines of
'this is exactly what was voted for, if we did but know it'.
I am not going into the rights and wrongs of Brexit; there are no winners in that debate any more; tribes have fixed lines, and merely shout at each other. But it does highlight the need for truth, and for informed debate where big decisions are made. Indeed, where all decisions are made.
Truth is a fragile commodity; 'alternative facts' are now firmly in our culture, and we have little idea where their entrenchment will lead us, in the big picture of our national life and politics.Although we might have some idea of where this will go as we look at the corrosive effects of lies, prejudices and 'alternative facts' as they impacted on the smaller world of our relationships. We have been here before. There is the cynicism with which Pontius Pilate asks Jesus at his trial 'what is truth?; set this against Jesus' assertion of himself 'I am the truth (made earlier in his ministry, not in response to Pilate).
But in the end, who has had more influence on the course of the world's history? Truth personified in Jesus the Christ, or the governor of a back-water province of the Roman Empire? With truth comes a package of goodies which includes kindness, goodness, patience, understanding, and more. This is worth striving for, valuing. It rejects easy answers, slogans, cynicism, and the rest. We can add to the store of goodness in the world by standing with truth, with informed debate,rather than the easier road of assumptions, slogans, prejudices, lies, difficult though that may be. Although it won't, at this stage, change the queues at Schipol.
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