Why lie?

I will never understand, to my dying day, why parents allow... let alone ENCOURAGE their kids to lie.

Let me say that I don't consider myself a naif, either. I understand that in 21st century America, “Ethical Behavior” has been replaced with “Situationally Ethical Behavior”, and the truth has become whatever people believe. But still, what can I say? I have this thing for the truth, and still find myself a little shocked when people don't tell it.

Case in point... this will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, but I go to the library once per week. Same library. At about the same time. Taking the same route. EVERY WEEK. Okay?

So, day before yesterday, I'm on my weekly pilgrimage to the library. I am headed north on a road with two lanes in each direction, and a center turn lane. I need to turn west. A car goes by in the turn lane, so I slip into the turn lane behind it. There's a break in the southbound traffic. I will confess that I didn't see the young man who's about to smash in my car door because, frankly, I have the right of way. I don't HAVE to look out for him... HE has to look out for ME. So I turn into the library. And he turns out, northbound, looking solidly left. I start honking and yelling (even though I know that the yelling won't do me any good) and he smacks into my driver's side door.

I pull into the library parking lot. Obviously the kid's first accident, because he just sits there, where he backed up at the stop sign, functionally blocking the intersection. I wait for him for a moment, to see if he's going to clear the intersection so that we can exchange information, and when he doesn't, I walk to his car and tell him to pull into the library parking lot so that he's not blocking traffic.

When he got there, he told me that he didn't see me. No shit. HE WASN'T LOOKING. Okay, no prob. He screwed up. It happens. I call the cops.

Shortly after that, his mommy arrives. So I figure that he must have spent the time sitting there to call her. “Oh no, mommy! I cwashed a car! Help me!”

So, mommy arrives and the first words out of her mouth are “See? You should be driving a bigger car like mom.” Mom drives an SUV. I explained to her that if he HAD been driving a larger car or (God forbid) an SUV, he may have seriously injured or killed me. No answer. Ah, I thought... mom is scheming. Trying to figure out a way to prevent this from being her widdle baby boy's fault.

So the cops arrive, we give our statements, I go about my business. My car still runs okay, I just can't open the driver's side door, and my front end is fairly seriously knocked out of alignment.

Sitting in my car waiting for someone that I wanted to see, I call Allstate, his insurance agency. The person who answers the phone, once I explain the situation to her, seems ready to wrap the whole thing up. She's talking about setting me up with one of their preferred body shops to get the repair done and oh, Mr. Schaffer, let's get you a rental car for while your car is in the shop. I tell her that I'd rather set all that up with their adjuster, so that I can check my schedule and the nearness of the body shops to my apartment. So I get the name and phone number of their adjuster.

Then everything stops.

When I get home that day, as I'm pulling into my parking space, MY insurance company, Geico, calls me. Apparently, HE'S filing a claim against ME. So then everything's on hold while they get recorded statements from both of us, blah blah blah.

I call Allstate's adjuster yesterday and give her my recorded statement. I call Geico's adjuster this morning and give her my statement. Then she drops the bombshell... the little brat is telling the insurance companies that I turned not from the turn lane, but from the traffic lane!

Is it just me or does that sound like something that mommy came up with to protect her widdle boy?

Let me make a suggestion to you, lady. If you EVER want your little boy to be a man and a productive member of society, instead of encouraging him to lie and pass the buck, why not just thank God that neither of us were seriously hurt, and use this as an object lesson to him about paying attention to his driving? It's what my parents would have done. Hell, it's what they DID do when I caused an accident as a teenager.

The biggest problem with lying is that it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The obnoxious thing about the truth is that, no matter how much you examine it, or pick at it, it remains whole. Lies start to come apart immediately under scrutiny. For instance, let's look at this lie. They boy says that he saw me turning from the traffic lane. That begs the question why didn't he STOP? If you someone doing something stupid, you stop to protect your own car, right? Failing that, if he saw me turning and didn't stop, then he rammed me intentionally, and it's STILL his fault. AND he's on the hook for reckless endangerment.

Now that I've started picking this lie apart, let's finish dismantling it with evidence. In police work, there are three types of evidence.

The first is physical evidence. In this case, the condition of the cars is the only physical evidence, and it's a wash. It supports both stories.

The second is direct evidence. This is eyewitness testimony, video tapes, pictures, etc. There is none of this as far as I know. So another wash.

The third is circumstantial. Although this is, by and large, the least reliable, being made entirely out of deduction and supposition, but it's also what most cases are built on. So let's look at the circumstantial evidence.

1) He's a young driver with two... maybe three years of driving experience. I'm a former cab driver with almost thirty years of driving experience and a clean driving record. So which one of us is more likely to make this kind of catastrophic fuck-up?
2) Every month, I drive seven hours each way to Arkansas and back, and either six hours each way to Kansas and back, or fourteen hours each way to Houston, TX and back. If I were this careless of a driver, how can I drive that much and still have a clean record and no accidents?
3) By lying, he profits. He gets out of a ticket and his mommy avoids having her insurance rates raised. By lying, I gain NO profit. I didn't get a ticket, and the worst that can happen to my insurance is that it comes out a wash – he collects from his, I collect from mine. They may raise my rates based on that, but they may raise my rates anyway, simply BECAUSE I was in an accident. Insurance companies are capricious.
4) Logic argues AGAINST his lie. Occam's Razor applies here, I think. Occam's Razor says that, all things being equal, the simplest explanation is often the correct one. If you hear about this accident, with no statements from either of us, your first thought is that he turned in to me. This is the simplest explanation and, thank you Occam, the correct one.
So parents, don't teach your kids to lie, okay? It sucks.

Peace.

Rev. Randal