Lying Still

 Lying is bad. 

This is something that I have tried, with some success to impress on those people I encounter on a daily basis. Most of these people are shorter than I am, and younger by a fair amount. It is very likely that the amount of time they have spent considering the consequences of not telling the truth is still quite small. The average fourth grader, for example, has only a few years of fabricating to come up with what might be considered believable untruths. 

This was part of the reason, way back when, that I decided to become a teacher based on my experiencing managing twenty-somethings at a book warehouse. One young man didn't come in for a week, and when he finally returned to work I asked him why he didn't call in. He told me "Because my phone didn't have any sevens on it." That's when I thought that maybe moving down half a generation or so might give me access to the thought process of these folks and maybe I could impact, at the very least, the quality of their fabrications.

In elementary school, the low end of the lying spectrum is the shrug of the shoulders. "Who did this?" Shrug of the shoulders. "Does anyone know how the crayons ended up on the floor?" Shrug of the shoulders. "Can I get a helper to put them back in the box?" Shrug of the shoulders. And so on. They aren't really lying at this point. They're taking the fifth. 

The next step in this evolution is the "accidental." It can be used as a form of confession, but it is specifically engineered to avoid blame. "Mister Caven, I accidentally kicked the ball on the roof." Or "I was playing tag with her and I accidentally punched her in the head." My inclination in these cases is to try to peel back that very thin veil of deceit and have them admit that they were, at the very least, being careless. More care would be needed from now on. Not a tough nut to crack. 

Usually. 

The really hard cases are the ones where the evidence is overwhelming but the insistence on innocence precludes everything else, including common sense. Watching a kid throw a rock at something. The something breaks. And then, when confronted by this eyewitness account, they will insist that I must have imagined all of that and with wide eyes protest their innocence. These reactions are most often found among those whose records and reputations precede them. 

And so it goes. My hope, as an educator, is that I can instill the lesson in them that telling the truth from the onset is the best course of action. Lying only makes things more difficult as reality shows up and starts to unravel the distortions. 

And maybe someday, when one of these kids decides to run for Congress, they won't have to remember all the lies they told just to keep their pretend career from crashing to the ground.