such a lonely word

If you search for tenderness
It isn’t hard to find.
You can have the love you need to live.
But if you look for truthfulness
You might just as well be blind.
It always seems to be so hard to give.

That’s right, Billy, honesty is such a lonely word … although with good reason—no one really wants to hear the truth.

[By the way: How is it possible that genius Piano Man hasn’t released any new material in 20(!) years, yet talentless, auto-tuned hacks like Taylor Swift are allowed to push out “songs” every 20 minutes? I will never ever understand it.]

But getting back to honesty, I was thinking of myself (as usual), and how many times a day that I bite down on my own thoughts and words so as not to tell what I perceive as the truth because it’ll hurt or offend someone. And not only in obvious moments when I want to blurt out something like, “Everyone knows you’re bald and that’s a freakin’ comb-over!” but when I write—I want to share stories about things like this one horrible troll with whom I used to work and how I made a pact with another co-worker that when this soulless demon is finally called back to hell, we’ll go to its grave and actually dance on it …

See? I held the truth back right there. I didn’t name a name, didn’t identify a gender, didn’t say where I was working, didn’t mention the co-worker or anything that would identify the douchebag—although I really, really want to.

It’s also not just worrying about offending someone or making trouble for myself. Take for example, the simple question: “How’s it going?” It’s pretty much accepted by all of us liars that if someone asks it, the only answer that anyone else (myself included) generally wants to hear is, “Fine,” even if someone’s standing there with one of their arms freshly hacked off and are bleeding out.

Okay, maybe that’s a different thing than actual honesty, but aside from the fact that the majority of us are so self-absorbed that we don’t really want to know, it seems like we’re constantly insulating ourselves and others from the truth, whatever it may be.

I suppose it’s the way we’re raised, in a way. Even though we are initially hardwired to be honest—just ask any toddler what they think of anything, and you’ll get a very straightforward (and often amusing) answer—we are nonetheless lied to right out of the box about everything from Santa Claus and death (“Rover went to a special dog farm”) to our actual abilities. Just once, wouldn’t you love to hear: “Look Mommy, I made a picture of you!” “Wow honey, that really … sucks. I mean, what the hell is this? I don’t have green skin and black smudges for eyes, and my head isn’t shaped like a broken egg. Holy crap! Do you even know what a human being looks like? Even if you’re going for a Picasso look, this is still absolute fail. Wow. I think we need to get your eyes tested because you might just be color blind, too.”

Okay, that *might* just be a bit much, but somewhere along the way we decided that life is just easier and maybe even better when we lie to each other. We do it so much we don’t even realize that we’re doing it—when we’re politically correct (no one has “problems” any more, they have “challenges;” nor are they “stupid” or “fat” but “intellectually challenged” or “gravity impaired”), when we bleep out “curse” words on TV or in music (even though we know exactly what they are), or when we see someone who’s been sick and tell them, “You look great.”

Again, I get that I’m mostly pointing out cases where we don’t want to hurt or offend, but what’s so bad about being hurt or offended on occasion? We used to live by the old “sticks and stones” axiom, but is that long gone now in the name of being more civilized and evolved? Because I’m not sure that’s working out, either. (See Boo Boo, Honey.)

Think about this: How many times do you catch yourself saying something like, “Well, honestly, I thought it was a good idea to set him on fire.” I do it too, and the implication is that when you preface a sentence with “honestly” or “to tell the truth,” you’re conceding that you’re lying the rest of the time you’re mouth is moving. Again, we all do it, either consciously or subconsciously, but it’s indicative of how guarded we’ve become in our speech.

Stephen Colbert famously coined the term “truthiness,” referring to the idea that people now believe what they say should be true even if it isn’t technically true. I know he was mostly mocking politics when he conceived it, but it certainly seems to have expanded to the general public. We don’t tell the truth any more, we sort of hint at it or accept the pieces that we want to be true, and chuck the rest.

As the always-wise “they” say: The truth hurts. And so, rather than deal with any sort of pain or discomfort, we assiduously try to avoid it—bread and circuses, rose-colored glasses, living with blinders on. Ignorance is bliss, and we do so enjoy our bliss.

It would be nice if we could somehow just find more bliss in being honest.