Not faking

A friend of mine, retired police officer, was once required to go to the home of a young lady who had been killed in a late-night auto accident, and tell her parents this sad news.

The girl's mother slapped him in the face and said, "No! It's not true!"

When I think of this story, it helps me understand the reluctance of many people to face truths that they come across. We all remember reading that the ancient Greeks made up mythology to help explain things they couldn't fully apprehend, but that was long ago, and they didn't have Google to help look things up.

The other night we had some terrible storms here in Baltimore. A fourteen-year-old young lady, riding with her mom in a car down Pot Spring Rd, was killed when a tree, felled by the wind, and possibly lightning, fell on the car.

This is so unspeakably sad, and to think, another second or two earlier or later, and she would have made it. That's why we realize that there is a reason for these things that we are not going to understand on earth, and for me, it's my faith that allows me to abide and wait to get the answer later.

But a local news reporter who was on the scene said that he was getting tweets and online remarks saying that the storm was "fake news."  This is a perfect example of how things affect us all in different ways. Unlike, say, a blizzard, a huge thunderstorm can affect just one swath of the larger metropolitan area, so it's entirely possible that on the day in question, some people in other parts of town saw nary a drop of rain, heard no thunder, saw no lightning...

Lost no teenaged loved one...

Even if you were to ask why a reporter would construct such an event out of the clear blue sky, so to speak, why would he or she, given the amount of events that occur here every day, create news that did not occur?

No, it has to be that some people don't like facing news they don't like. However, there are opinions and there are facts. You and I might differ on whether it should be a crime to encourage one's boyfriend to commit suicide; there can be two ways of looking at such things. But whether or not a tree came down and ended the life of a young person is not fake news, and claiming that it is is the most awful form of fakery.