From the time that most of us could utter our first words, we were taught that it’s wrong to lie. We even had cute little movies and stories like Pinocchio or The Little Boy Who Cried Wolf that entertained us as kids but carried deeper moral values that our parents did not hesitate to reinforce. The basic premise was that not only is it wrong to lie but your word is your bond and if you can’t stand on your word, what else do you have? Nothing.
Earlier this week Detroit closed a chapter on a scandal, that has festered in this city like an infected canker sore, when Christine Beatty pleaded guilty to perjury charges in relation to the Whistleblower case. Now that she and former Mayor Kilpatrick have been forced to publicly acknowledge their wrongdoing and pay their debt to society, one is left to wonder was it worth it?
It started with one lie and that lie turned into a series of other lies which quickly snowballed into a plethora of additional lies to cover up the old ones. And what ensued was a vicious cycle of untruths that have impacted the lives of not only the accused but that of their families, friends and co-workers, and has cost the city a lot of money.
No one is impervious to the temptations of life but the valor lies in one’s ability to take responsibility for one’s mistakes. We all make them but the key is to learn from them, not cover them up.
It is a sad, sad situation that two intelligent people who had so much going for them got caught up in a bad situation that has since taken them away from their families and cost a lot of people their jobs. But the lesson that we all need to take away from this situation is that old adage that we were all taught at a very young age: Thou shalt not lie.
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