Sorry Pinocchio, we just don’t believe you anymore.
That’s the problem with lying. Once you tell one, it’s hard to regain that credibility. I’ll confess. I can’t listen to him anymore. I just don’t believe a darn thing he says and I feel bad about that. I wish I could listen. I wish I, like others of my friends and colleagues could actually listen to one of those State of the Union Addresses but frankly, I just can’t stomach it.
My kids and I talk about it on a regular basis. Lying, not the State of the Union Address. “It’s a big deal to me,” I’m fond of saying. There are few things that are worse in my mind. Sure, it may seem like a solution in the short run, it may even get you what you want in the moment, but long term, those lies will kill your credibility.
The problem with lying, I tell them, is that once you’ve told one, it’s hard to resist telling another… and another and another. And the next thing you know, you are so far from the truth you have no idea how to get back there.
And then something really awful happens. No one believes you anymore. You can’t be trusted. Like the boy who cried wolf, or the wonderful tale about the wooden boy, lying inevitably destroys trust and as Pinocchio finds out, the road back from “Pleasure Island” is a difficult journey.
Of course, it’s not like Bush is the only politician that lied but that argument is a slippery slope. Pointing out other’s failures is no way to justify one’s own. Whatever the reason for the deception, and we’ve all heard many of them, it was deception never the less, and once the deception was revealed, his fate was sealed, at least in my mind.
Now, in the next week, we’ll be asked to choose candidates to captain this ship through turbulent seas. What do we look for? What do we want? What matters to us?
For me, the answer is simple. I want someone who’s going to tell us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Sometimes the truth is bad news. Sometimes the truth is painful. But at least it’s real. And the sooner we get to looking at the way things really are, the sooner we’ll be on the road to recovery.
