Liar, Liar....

I do not lie. Many (most?) people as they go through life, see lying is an easy way to get in or get out of something. While he may or may not have said it, Mark Twain is credited with the quote: "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything" (meaning it's a lot harder trying to remember what you said to whom rather than just telling the truth where your story won't change).

How honest am I? I remember one day at work I spilled toner trying to install a new cartridge (that stuff is worse than glitter). No one was around, and I just could have left, but I didn't. I called the office and told them what I had done. Yes, I am that honest.

Through the years, I do remember telling my students early in the school year (using an appropriate facial expression and deep gravitas) that if they lied to me once and got caught, it would be a long time before I ever trusted them again. Along the way, that resulted often in my asking, "Did you do that?" The response was usually a meek, "Yes." And that solved a lot of problems that could have easily grown like Pinocchio's nose.

I have zero respect for liars. "By a lie, a man... annihiliates his dignity as a man." (Immanuel Kant). Is that so hard to understand? I ran into one former student who told me he had been in the army. I asked what his MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) had been. He didn't know what I meant. Bus-ted! Stolen valor? I learned he was a pathological liar and to trust nothing he said. Sad situation. 

In school, I was known for my frequent truly-true "stories" (one girl once told me she thought I'd really be fun at a party because I was so random and know so much (fooled her, didn't I). From the student perspective, every story was time away from whatever we were doing. When a work we were reading reminded me of something in my past, I'd put down the book and begin.

What they didn't know is virtually every story actually had a point that advanced and supported the school's Mission statement: "Together we challenge one another to develop and demonstrate the attitudes, skills, and knowledge essential to attaining excellence in self, family and community." (I added the Oxford comma just because, well, that's what I do.)

I had been where the kids were, but they haven't been where I was. I learned and grew through my experiences through the years and am pretty happy with the person I have become. I wanted them to know I was human and made mistakes along the way - that  I made decisions that I look back on and regret (but learned from).

Anyhow, telling the truth is difficult. I Googled 'truth,' and I was presented with a list of 1,540,000,000 hits. Truth is a major topic in philosophy and has been discussed for thousands of years. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes "the proble

Perhaps defining truth is much like Supreme Court's Justice Stweart Potter's famous comment regarding pornography: " I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description["hard-core pornography'], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." 

I can't accept people who lie. I am surprised by those who can and do on a daily basis.

Oops, this is getting too heady, so if you take anything away from this, it's "Tell the truth."