It’s the cover-up that’s the problem, right?
You do something wrong or even just embarrassing, maybe culturally contrary, and you instinctively search for a way to smooth it over, make it better, cover it up. And that’s often when the lying starts. The stuff you do or say to provide cover ends up being worse than the stuff you did to begin with.
That’s the way it worked with President Nixon and the whole Watergate deal. And that’s what everybody talked about a couple of decades later when President Clinton was in office too. And it’s not just presidents. The list is nearly (Lance Armstrong) endless when it comes to folks who (Tiger Woods) have gone to great lengths (David Petraeus) to shroud their sins in secrecy.
So shouldn’t it be refreshing when somebody just accepts the “blame” right out of the gate? Fesses up? Takes ownership?
Maybe.
Notice, if you will, the quote marks around the word blame a couple of lines ago. Because sometimes when we push away from one extreme (sweeping everything under the carpet), we flip ourselves all the way over to the other extreme (not seeing anything wrong with it in the first place).
Consider these recent examples:
Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries has said some pretty bold things about “owning” the brand’s distaste for uncool (read: fat) consumers. Fronting a retailer that doesn’t bother to stock XL or XXL sizes in women’s clothing, he told Salon, “In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids. Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”
Next up. While speaking on a panel at the Advertising Week Europe conference in London, Esquire editor Alex Bilmes readily admitted his magazine tends to display pictures of “ornamental” women “in the same way we provide pictures of cool cars.” According to The Guardian, he went on to claim that, rather than being anti-women, that entrenched practice at his men’s mag was actually far “more honest” than many women’s magazines. He stated it was the women’s mag industry that was actually guilty of perpetuating stereotyped and negative images of women: “We are more ethnically diverse, more shape diverse … In fashion magazines women are much thinner. We have older women, not really old, in their 40s.”
One more. Some of the new literature aimed at young adults is getting steamier and more frank about sexuality. But Abbi Glines, author of the Sea Breeze series, responds to critics of her books with, according to Express, “Yes, there is sex, but these aren’t porn books for children. These are books about the excitement of first love and the first sexual encounters. Yes, I could cut the sex out, but that wouldn’t be realistic.”
See. Nobody’s covering anything up here. They’re not trying to make it all go away. They’re manning up to their “misdeeds.” And yet somehow I don’t feel any better about it. In fact, I might feel worse. Because when we decide to change the definitions of what’s right and wrong rather than “merely” try to weasel out of the wrongs we’ve done, we’re actually doing a whole lot more damage to our hearts and to our worldviews.
In its simplest terms, this is the difference between two reactions a 4-year-old might have when caught with his hand stuck in the cookie jar. Dad expects him to try to get out of it by blaming his sister or saying he was merely putting a cookie in the jar rather than taking one out. And parents will punish appropriately to gradually change his mind about what he currently sees as the “benefits” of disobeying. But it’s quite a different deal if this kid calmly explains that it is his inalienable right to eat as many cookies as he wishes to, and that it was Mom’s instructions to the contrary that are in error, not his actions.
Now extrapolate to a whole host of moral and ethical issues encompassing but not limited to sexuality, exploitation, prejudice, dishonesty, outright crime and even profanity. The implications are dizzying, but of course this isn’t suddenly a new problem we’re facing in the Internet age. Isaiah called out the issue in chapter five of his prophetical book:
What sorrow for those who say that evil is good and good is evil, that dark is light and light is dark, that bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter. What sorrow for those who are wise in their own eyes and think themselves so clever. (NLT)
More sorrow than for those who evade and maneuver? I think maybe so.
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