White lies: relationships, politics and sports

I am curious:  Do you suffer from cerebral echoes?  I do, and sometimes there just is no relief to be found.

Case in point:  I was talking with a friend of the other gender last week and an innocent subject breached the conversation to which her response was “a little white lie.”  She would have no way of knowing this, but I knew that her little fib was an impossibility.  I left it unchallenged, but her words continue to echo through my head without decreasing in intensity.

Why is it that people so readily expect dishonesty to be a beneficial foundational choice in relationship building between people? 

For those who are sports fans of any genre, we have all been in the situation where a member of our preferred team commits a foul that goes uncalled.  Do we stand and scream at the officials?  No!  But let an uncalled foul happen on the other side, and we don’t stop complaining for a week.  This disingenuous nature runs rampant throughout our society.  Our perception that what benefits our here-and-now outweighs the long term consequences is dangerous and foolhardy.

I could quite easily correlate this concept to the current presidential campaign and point to the innumerable lies and broken promises that has led to a divisive “none-of-the-above” candidate to be leading in the polls, but I made a promise to myself I wouldn’t let this stray into politics.

On the outside, we habitually cloak ourselves in garish costumes and stage makeup to present our best appearance, and a significant part of that charade is pretending to be someone or something other than the raw truth that hides beneath our faux façade.  How many times have we seen or experienced relationships grow apart, when in reality, the people just gradually dropped the pretense and showed themselves as they have always been?  “You aren’t the person I fell in love with.”  Maybe, maybe not.

In the Biblical sense, I am in no position to “cast the first stone,” but I do think and consequently strive to live my life with honesty as a forthright requirement in all of my relationships: business, casual and romance.  The dénouement to this piece could easily circle back to sports or politics or relationships, but I’ll leave the reverberation of the consequences of actions to echo around in your cranium bouncing off of all those indiscretions committed, ignored and forgiven, and then for you to decide whether those white lies made your relationships, you, or for that matter, anyone else, better or worse.