We have been told by the time we were little kids that roses are red, and violets are blue, and if you don’t believe this, nothing can be true. 

Well, roses are red. I can prove it. I have some in my backyard. 

But are violets blue? I’m not so sure about that. As a printer by trade, I’m particularly sensitive to hues, saturations and color variances. The closest violets get to blue is, well, violet, which is not exactly blue. 

Actually roses are red, white, yellow, beige, pink, orange, peach, burgundy, purple, green, blue, black, multi-color, shades of each of those colors, and more. 

And to be clear violets are not a true ultramarine or even a cobalt blue, like a blue seen in the sky. Rather, violets are yellow, pink, white, cream, violet, bicolored, and shades of these.    

This brings up the question as to whether calling a yellow violet a violet is the right thing to do. Maybe yellow violets ought to be called yellows just to be accurate. 

The point I am trying to make is that just because we have said something repeatedly, or that something has been told to us ad nauseam, that does not make it either true or the only way it is.  No matter who says it.  And no matter how often. 

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A good example is when I was growing up. I didn’t hear all this talk about abortions and gay marriages and race relations and people getting shot and all this crime and people kneeling for the national anthem.  We knew our place, dressed appropriately and respected the flag and our nation. 

But did we? 

Abortions were done illegally. Women died. Abortions were done just the same. 

Men were not held to responsibility. Kids were left to live in poverty or in orphanages out of sight and out of mind. 

Gays kept their sexual preferences secret. 

Race relations were awful. Blacks were mistreated. Murdered. Hung from trees. So were Asians, Hispanics and anyone else who was not from preferred areas of Europe. Even the Italians had their own mobs that ran some cities. During World War II the American government confiscated everything from Americans of Japanese descent and locked them up in what would be America’s own concentration camps. As a boy, I recall a cross being burned on the lawn of my father’s home, because he was Jewish and did not belong in our town. 

People carried guns. Just like today. The difference is that then when people were murdered, it was a lot harder to track them down and to prove they were guilty or innocent. Often the first black person walking down the street was arrested, charged, found guilty and locked up for years or worse. 

Women could not vote. Had no rights. Were paid less than men for the same work. Were told by their husbands and politicians what they could and could not do. 

And the flag. Let’s be serious for a moment. The Confederate flag flew higher in some state capitols than did the U.S. flag. And it still flies.  Look around Franklin County. How often do you see the Confederate flag flying?  Or attached to a car or motorcycle? Or tattooed on someone’s arm? It was the Confederate states that wanted the destruction of the Union and the U.S. flag. Some people still feel this way.  And they’re not football players. 

The real difference between then and now is that then there was no internet. 

Then to find the temperature we had to look at a thermometer. (That is a device that usually hung on a wall with a glass tube in it and mercury that went up and down depending on how hot or cold the area around the thermometer was.) 

Anyway, it is the relatively recent invention of the internet that has changed everything. If someone does something weird in California, we learn about it near instantly here in Pennsylvania. We just look at our internet connected phones to get the temperature, the weather and the news as it happens. Very few people really know or care how this internet thing works, but everyone depends on it. 
That does not mean that there is more crime than before, or more of anything for that matter than before. Rather it just means that we find out about it faster and more often. 

Before the internet, we could not see these things instantly or be bombarded with things that make us uncomfortable. Maybe that is what is meant by President Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan. Get rid of the internet and the newspapers and the offending news media and the ugliness we see on television and hear on the radio. Being shielded from all this news, from these offending ideas, might make some of us feel better. The world may still be an ugly place, but we could just ignore it. 

That way we could be told that roses are red, and violets are blue. And who would know?   

Bill Gindlesperger is a central Pennsylvanian, Shippensburg University trustee and founder of eLynxx Solutions that provides software for managing direct mail, marketing and print.  He is a board member, campaign adviser, published author and Talk Radio 103.7 commentator.  He can be reached at


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