When people are hungry, they will follow whomever gives them food. When people are cold, they will follow whomever gives them warm shelter.

Desperate people do not evaluate what they are being told or even what they can see with their own eyes. They follow those who promise them a solution to their immediate problem.

Deception is easy.

“Truth,” the narrator in Mitch Albom’s 2023 novel “The Little Liar,” follows the story of three young Jewish children in Salonika, Greece, during the Holocaust. The youngest child, who has never told a lie, is used by a Nazi SS officer to herd Jews into train cattle cars with the promise of jobs and homes in Poland.

Their homes in Salonika have been seized by the Nazis. Their businesses have been destroyed. They have been relocated to a dirty ghetto in the city. They see Nazis brutally murder their neighbors. But they still believe what “the little liar” says - the train will take them to a better life.

“Truth” even provides shades of the heroes of high-jacked Flight 93, which crashed into a field in Shanksville, Somerset County, Sept. 11, 2001, by saying the some 80 Jews crammed into the cattle car could have overpowered the one guard, if they had just worked together.

Presidential and Pennsylvania Senate candidate campaign ads are flooding television and the internet. Accusations of extreme Neo-Nazi support are peppered throughout the ads by those in the opposing party.

An Oley Valley, Berks County, school board member was recently censured for having Nazi symbols on her garage. She denied putting the symbols there, saying they were there when she moved in some 11 years ago. The school board director said she had painted over them, but over time, the paint faded and the symbols began to show through.

With AI able to alter faces and voices; with the unsettled state of affairs between Israel and Hamas and hostages still remaining captive; with so much of our news coming from sites on the internet, remain skeptical of everything you see, hear and read virtually.

Question everything.

Do not believe the “big lie” just because someone promises you a better life in exchange for your vote.

The real “truth” is out there.

Deb Palmieri

editor

Parkland Press

Northwestern Press