How do you know when your government is lying to you?

Sometimes you just need to follow the news.

But, of course, these days, that won’t work.

Sometimes our local officials need to take the liars to court. We all remember, if I remember correctly, those long years ago, when the government pretended to wage a war against drugs. If memory serves, it was the courageous Maxine Waters who took the CIA to court where they confessed under oath that they were the ones bringing crack cocaine in to south-central L.A., and the “war on drugs” was a hoax. The government used drugs to neutralize the young generation which was rising up since the days of the Freedom Marches. The marchers wanted to re-make America in Constitutional terms. They had read the words. Assassinations, and shooting students on college campuses back then didn’t stop the angry progressive students in the ‘60s, but drugs did. It worked like a charm, and put the whole generation to sleep. I was there and saw it happen all around me. It helps when you were there in person as an eyewitness, a primary source, and can be footnoted for research.

These days you can try to invoke the law, but that doesn’t always work. Justice climbs the ladder, but dissipates at the top.

So many problems have been with us for so long that it seems like forever.

I was a college student in the early ‘60s. UCR had just opened as a general campus and our freshman class was the first big inaugural influx.

The school was proud to be a small intense Liberal Arts Humanities based university, and they wanted to give us an Ivy League education. They hired the best professors. They brought world-class figures to lecture and perform. We were on the A-list of traveling events.

Los Angeles was over the hill sixty miles away to the west, and UCR filled the isolation of the Riverside valley with quality presentations you would otherwise find at UCLA in the Big City.

Timothy Leary, the guru of LSD, was on the FBI Most Wanted List. I remember, when I was much younger, how that list was posted in the post office, with photos, so we could recognize them if we saw them on the street. It was our civic duty to finger the miscreants and turn them in. Leary was polluting the minds of America’s youth with psychedelics, and there was a nation-wide man hunt to catch him and bring him to justice and incarceration. President Nixon called him “the most dangerous man in America.”

Imagine my dismay when posters around campus advertised Timothy Leary’s lecture in the main auditorium. Apparently he was on a lecture circuit and UCR was one of his stops.

I think the lecture was free and I don’t remember much about it, because he wasn’t speaking to me.

But the auditorium was packed, and UCR became mainstream.

I was outraged by the absolute indifference of a government that didn’t care at all about lying to the people. I imagined myself standing up in the audience and saying loudly, “You FBI agents, I know you’re there scattered throughout the auditorium, you profess a man hunt for the criminal you just can’t find and catch. I’ll do your job for you. There he is! On stage!”

Not every branch of government lies to the people all the time, and usually not so openly obviously. But there’s a long tradition and many examples.

I think we can all agree that this is wrong. Agreement is the start of a solution.

Our government works for us. If we relinquish our involvement, bad things happen.

What else is new?