Larry D. Lauer

With today’s mixture of outlandish statements, outright lies, and name calling it is becoming more clear every day that without integrity and clarity our words no longer have any consistent meaning.

I was talking with a colleague the other day about why he is so afraid of Donald Trump. He said it’s simple: ” Trump said he admires Putin who clearly is a dictator. He also said that as president if he did not like his generals he would fire them and find ones he did. That sounds to me like a person on his way to creating a dictatorship.”

Another colleague said about Clinton: “She has refused for far too long to explain in simple terms what actually led her to put a private internet server in her home. At first I thought it was just a campaign strategy, but watching her fumble around on television all this time I have come to think she just can’t be trusted to do the right thing.”

Without a base of fundamental integrity and transparency, and without a commitment to the accurate use of language, there is no hope for trusting  any speaker we ever hear or see. If we continue like this in today’s image saturated and social media dominated world we will never know for sure what we are getting in a public servant. And what’s more, this leadership uncertainty can also carry far beyond politics into business, nonprofits, education, and everywhere else.

The basic question now is this: “Are there enough good people in media, politics and the rest of society who are disgusted enough to take charge of the situation and set the standards necessary to save the day?  The irony is that the same digital technology that enable this mess to begin with could actually be used to fix it.