Jeremiah 14:6. "The wild asses stand on the bare heights, they pant for air like jackals; their eyes fail because there is no herbage."

There is a line in those ubiquitous "We Believe" signs that says "Water is Life" and I always wondered what they were getting at with that. Is there some perceived argument that water is not necessary for life? Who is saying that? That kind of gets to my problem with those signs in general - they are nothing but a list of tautologies that merely state limited truths as if they are resistance. Speaking truth can be resistance in this world of lies, don't get me wrong, but these signs state limited truths as if the larger truth which encompasses them is false. For example, they proclaim "No Human is Illegal" (of course no human is illegal, but law is real (just like science!) and people break it); and "Women's Rights are Human Rights" (of course they are, since women are human beings, but then again, so are the unborn, and we seem to have pitted women's rights against the rights of the unborn).

These signs, and the thinking behind them, are really just a way of using limited truth to promote lies. The tautologies are used to imply someone "hateful" is arguing against these propositions, when instead most people recognize each statement on the signs as true, but too limited in scope. The truth is much deeper than the statements on the signs, so the signs actually indicate a narrow-minded way of thinking, and their display implies a judgmental or, dare I say, hateful attitude towards people with broader minds.

Getting back, then, to the wild asses standing on the bare heights panting, their eyes failing because there is no herbage, I am thinking of the truth as the herbage. It, like water, is necessary for life. When we are deprived of the full truth, our eyes begin to fail, we see things wrongly, and therefore we live wrongly. We become narrow-minded, argumentative, and hateful. We "deprive the land of its herbage" because we don't want to see those who are pursuing the full truth find it and be satisfied, we don't want them to have truth, we only want them to have "our truth," the limited truth that is most important to us.

We harm everyone when we get into this narrow-minded state. We cause the world to experience a drought of truth, which soon leads to a lack of herbage for everyone.