Truth Needs to Be Told

I can handle the truth.

You may remember that scene in the 1992 movie, “A Few Good Men,” where a very young Tom Cruise is questioning a very angry Jack Nicholson in a highly contentious military trial.

When asked for an answer to his probing legal question, Nicholson delivers an award-worthy testimony, screaming in perfectly pitched toxic masculinity: “You can’t handle the truth!”

Safe to say there is a lot of untruth, mistruths, misinformation, disinformation and lies happening in our culture. For some of us this infiltrates our personal lives. It all has me flashing back to that cinematic scene 31 years ago.

But the truth is what we need to handle — like it or not.

Years ago I would ask my very young sons if they were performing an obvious fib about anything from who ate the last brownie to who broke the remote control, “Is that true or not true?”

For the record, sometimes they would admit it was not. My goal was to model for them that even little lies were not OK and that they have accountability for their actions, even if it is only about leaving their dirty socks on the bedroom floor.

Yes, I am guilty of massaging the past into neater pockets of convenience, glossing over some rough patches with a golden lens of forgiveness and omissions. It wasn’t that bad. She didn’t mean to do that. I am more successful than this. No harm, no foul.

But the truth is, the whole truth is non-negotiable. Versions of events — even when they are padded with comfortable haze — must reflect the basis of reality.

People can be assigned new costumes in our reworked memories, but the dialog, plot and characters need to be de-fictionalized. And we need to be responsible for the truths we commit and create.

As someone who has spent her professional life as a journalist and author with the goal of writing and telling the truth, I feel a visceral discomfort when people I know and love — as well as role models, mentors, leaders and icons I revere — misrepresent the past or present. Or when they just plain lie.

I am not referring to innocuous bending of truths like a changed recipe or a compliment that is not fully earned. Those are massaged truths with no consequences — to be honest, the weight listed on my driver’s license is off a little bit.

The last decade of the rise of the #MeToo, #TimesUp and #BlackLivesMatter movements have centered on individuals excavating their true stories and boldly reporting injustice. Their calls for truth sometimes end in reformation, but they also can be met with denials, violence, resistance and outrage.

It seems almost every day calls to stand up to the truth surface for figures from university football coaches to university presidents, billionaires, elected officials, leaders and policy makers. Book and curriculum bans seek to remove written truths of history. Political leaders seek to reassure us that what we witnessed did not really happen.

Recently the expansion of artificial intelligence into our work lives as well as home lives has become unavoidable. While manipulating photos has been around since the early days of photography and dark rooms, only now is it almost impossible to discern what is real and what is AI-generated.

Truth and authenticity need to be the default positions — but they aren’t.

“To Tell The Truth” is a TV show that has been airing since 1956 and is still on network TV. The point of the game show is for celebrity guests to try to discern which of the contestants professing an outrageous life story is actually telling the truth.

As if we don’t have to do this in real life every day.

Someone I know and love recently presented me with a version of the past that is not at all what I know or remember. And I have receipts. There is no convincing them that what they know to be true is not what I know to be true.

So I return to the question and ask myself what I asked my boys when they were very small and quaked in denial about minutiae like chores or laundry or homework.

“Is that true or not true?”

I need to know.