Make Lying Wrong Again

      Children lie. We expect it because they are afraid of what would happen if they uttered the truth.

     Adults lie. This we don't expect and it unsettles us no end when we discover that we have been lied to. Not the little white lies like, "I am running late" when the fact is we have over slept. The disturbing lies are those which are corroborated by others and thus made more hurtful.

     I remember organizing a high school reunion and group of my classmates decided to have a "free" party for 60 to 100 invited guests. I had put a lot of time into organizing the event, along with a committee of volunteers working in the Cloud. We used Social Media before it had become a dirty word and expected a great turnout by our classmates.

     Sad to say that other classmates with less lofty ambitions also noticed all our work.  Their plan was clever in that they timed their party so it would roughly end when the actual reunion was set to begin. Unfortunately, many of the invitees got so drunk on the "free" food and drink they were either late or didn't show. The smart ones only bought one ticket and left me wondering if they had recently gotten a divorce. 

      The not so amusing feature of the story was I could tell something was wrong by the names of those electing not to come or cancelling at the last minute. I was a restaurateur for a long time so I was very familiar with reservation patterns. I figured it out for certain on the day before the party. I decided on the spot not to mention it to anyone.

      You might ask yourself like I did, "Why would they do such a thing?" and lie to my face about it? The best answer I could ever come up with was, "They did it because they could." It likely didn't cost anything because the hosts were rich and could easily bury it somewhere in their taxes as a business expense.

      You might also ask yourself , "Why is he writing about it now?" The answer is simply because I can. I also don't every want to seeing lying on such as epic scale again. It's bad enough our Federal Government has been corrupted to no end. No need for it to trickle down to the local level. It will be at the local level we will begin to rebuild our economy. It will initially take thousands of people trusting one another. The thousands of transactions and network connections will have to grow into millions before we start to feel good about ourselves again. This is all predicated on our not lying to ourselves or to our friends and neighbors. It might be too late to rectify the damage from eight summers ago. The instigators a long time ago moved into hiding behind their gated communities. Maybe someday they might feel some remorse and try to make amends. All I can offer is the words of Dr. Martin Luther King:

     The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.