delusional conclusions

The truth is better than omission which is worse than a lie in my opinion. Omission is a deliberate strategy that leaves out information for whatever reason which in turn, doesn't allow for informed decision making. To me, omission is more deceitful than a lie. Now, there are times when omission and lies are okay, like when you’re throwing a surprise party, when something good will come of it. But right now, I am thinking of instances when because some piece of the story is omitted, we come to a delusional conclusion. Pictorially, it goes something like this.

I sent this photograph to a few friends last week as an expression of what I was feeling at the time. So many things were happening at once, one of them being my discovery that a trusted individual had omitted information that would have allowed me to make other choices had I known. After cropping some pictures, this seemed to say what I could not…

While it seemed that all of those who received it felt something, I know that each of them had a different reaction; one experienced feelings similar to mine then commented on the picture revealing that it was not clear exactly what was in view. Variations on the same photo are…

…but the full unedited shot makes unmistakable the truth of what is in the frame...

I love to see the pictures within my pictures, to find different stories in each corner. When I send out a cropped photo, the person looking only sees a fraction of the whole because of what I have chosen to remove, they can only form an opinion on what’s there. Since I don’t use my pics for political purposes, there is no negative fall out; my ego can take it when someone questions me and actually, that gets me to my point.

In this era of who’s on first, we and the media fail to question the sound bites and snippets we hear and see. We rush to judgment, placing guilt before innocence, based on information fraught with omissions and distortions then run and tell it as if it was gospel, most recently demonstrated by the Shirley Sherrod incident. People get hurt, reputations damaged. Apologies mop at the mess but can never reach all the narrow minds of ill informed crevices, leaving behind permanent stains that shadow the real truth. Can we continue to behave at this level of ignorance and expect to raise a generation that won’t lead us back to out and out acceptability of witch hunts, lynching, and any other form of unacceptable barbaric behavior? The next time you hear something, the first action taken should be to push pause followed by a little fact finding before you get in the mix, and then…

keep your peepers open!®