…you are deluded by men who have either deceived themselves or wish to deceive you. – Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States, serving from 1829-37. A complete review of Jackson’s presidency is beyond the scope of this feature, but it is interesting to note Jackson was the last president to preside over an America that was debt free.

Today’s Thought has particular relevance today. We are in the midst of as contentious an election as this has nation has seen, which is saying something because this nation has a long, honorable history of contentious presidential elections. Those who think the 2016 election cycle is anything special has either forgotten the lessons they learned in school or they skipped school altogether. The only thing that has changed is the medium, this nation having gone from broadsheets, town criers and pamphlets to radio, television and the Internet.

…you are deluded by men…

Politicians say this and politicians say that and, as numerous organizations are pointing out, not everything we are told is true. Fact checking has gone from a cottage industry to an integral part of coverage of any speech.

Too bad, really, because candidates for any office, be it dog catcher or president, should be telling us the truth and citing valid statistics. That they are not is our fault and not theirs. We are not going to bother citing specific examples. One there are so many it would be too time consuming to pick out one or two. Every major candidate for a major office has issued their share of half-truths, falsehoods and misinformation. Some intentionally, some unwittingly

…who are either deceived themselves or wish to deceive you.

Whether someone is deluding themselves with information they believe is true, or whether they are lying to us in an attempt to deceive us is not particularly important because nobody deludes us without our consent. If politicians are getting away with issuing misinformation and falsehoods it is only because we are allowing it by continuing to pay attention to them. When we stop paying attention to falsehoods and start demanding the truth, I think we will be surprised at how fast we get it. We are merely being given what we are tolerating.

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We only need travel enough to give our intellect an airing. – Henry David Thoreau, Diary entry, November 20, 1857

Thoreau had a lot of skills as a writer. One of our favorites is reducing life down to its most basic level. Whether he was advising us to proceed confidently in the direction of our dreams or telling us he went to the woods because he wished to live deliberately and front only the essential facts of life, Thoreau provided the framework for a good life in few words.

Today’s thought does this, too. Traveling, of course, is a favorite pastime of a lot of, perhaps most, people. We even enjoy it ourselves and like most others we’ve done our share of traveling, mainly road trips.

Our own experience is Thoreau is correct. We need to get out of our everyday lives for a while.

This is true for writers. Like most writers, we have our share of projects going on. Every day we write The Diary of a Nobody, we started writing a new novel recently and even had a part-time gig doing some copywriting. And I’m running for Congress, the Libertarian nominee from Colorado’s 3^rd Congressional District. The mind had been doing a significant amount of work the past few month and I needed a break. We had been so busy, in fact, this feature had even taken a modest hiatus.

A road trip with my wife’s daughter provided the perfect escape. I flew down to San Diego to supervise her discharge from the Navy, and from there we took her car to Los Angeles and then Boise, before heading to the family home in Colorado.

I stopped writing a couple of days into the trip. There was no desire to, rare because like most artists I write from an inner compulsion, not in response to outside influences. Not only did I not write, I didn’t even think about writing, even rarer because every person is a character and every situation a plot and good luck chasing plots and characters out of a writer’s mind.

You can’t spend your life on vacation, of course, and it was good to return home. I was back at the keyboard within a half-hour of returning home. The break was as necessary as it was beneficial. The intellect had gotten its airing and was back to humming on all cylinders.

It’s a lesson can we can all benefit from. Everyday life gets, well, awfully every day at times and it’s good to get away.

And it’s good to get back.

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