The Crayon Lie
Alright, you have approximately 10 seconds to think of the worst lie that you have ever told anyone. Ready, set, go! But, seriously, what’s the worst lie you’ve ever told anyone in your whole entire life? And, can it top the most horrific, shocking, nastiest lie that I’ve ever told?
The worst lies that people tell, tend to be when they are young children, not when they are in their rebellious teenager phases, as most would think. Kids encounter their first instance of lying, probably around the age of 3. That’s right, little children who are barely potty trained, know how to grasp the complex concept of true versus false reality. They can see the truth, decide they like another alternate fantasy scenario of the truth better, and convince others of this made up false reality.
Kids are taught how to lie, most probably by their parents. It’s not deliberate, of course. Parents don’t sit down with kids and lecture them on how to lie, although they might lecture them on always telling the truth. The thing is, kids see parents lying and then they learn from that. How many times has someone called the house looking for a parent, and the parent tells the kid to say I’m not here right now? Kids know that they were lied to about fantastical ideas such as Santa Claus and the Tooth fairy. So, even though parents lie about those ideas to protect their kids and to let them live a so called innocent childhood in which they believed in this great thing, when any kid figures out that Santa isn’t real, all he’s really going to think is along the lines of wow, my parents went through so much trouble to lie to me and my whole childhood is a great big lie.
You might think that lying about something like Santa is okay, as is telling lies to protect someone, just little white lies. But, when is the line drawn? What makes it okay to lie in this situation, but not that one? Little kids will see their parents, lying just one single time and think it’s okay to lie, my parents do. But, they won’t know when it is and isn’t acceptable to lie. Parents think that they know what it is acceptable to lie and when it isn’t. But, is it really ever acceptable to lie?
I’ll tell you that there is only really one situation is which it may be acceptable to lie, and this situation is so rare that the majority of us humans, won’t even face anything like it in our whole life. Yet, how many times have we all lied? It’s actually dehumanizing to think of how many people lie every day for really no needed reason.
The worst lie, I ever told, it was for no needed reason. There was this one girl, let’s just call her, Eliza, that my mom would always set up playdates for me with, because my mom was friends with Eliza’s mom. Our moms may have been friends, but I was definitely not friends with this Eliza girl. She would just never be quiet, you know? Anyway, one day she kept on smelling the berry pink crayon that we were coloring with and she couldn’t stop talking about how good it smelled. Then she said that it smelled so good almost as good as an actual blueberry which you can eat. Of course then a devious little thought went through my head. I told Eliza that berry pink crayons did in fact taste great. And she gave me a funny look at this, so then I continued on and was like oh my god, you’ve never ever heard that you can eat berry pink crayons and that they taste so delicious. Of course she said of course I’ve heard that, I’ve just never actually ate one before. So, I said, come on I want you taste this great thing, you just have to warm it up in the microwave for about half an hour so that it’ll taste so yummy!
I wanted her to not only to eat a crayon, a nonedible one for that matter, but to also burn her tongue on the hot molten thing, in hopes that she would literally never be able to talk to me again. Which, I know was extremely mean, and the whole thing about the crayon being edible was a big lie, but back then I thought that just because this girl bothered me, it was okay to lie to her.
When, actually the only time it would be okay to lie to anyone would be in a situation extremely, not slightly, similar to this: person is hiding innocent Jews from the Nazis in his home. Nazi soldiers come to persons house asking if he knows where the Jews are being kept. He is protecting innocent people from evil people. In that case, only, is it alright to lie. Because if you lie in situations that aren’t like that one, then nothing is gained.
My lie to that girl caused a great big ol’ mess. She warmed the crayon up in the microwave for half an hour. Wax was stuck to the microwave floor. The microwave was no longer useable, so we lost our microwave that day. When Eliza opened the microwave, a few splashes of hot wax splashed her, which looked painful. And, she still ate what parts of the crayon she could and when she saw that it didn’t taste great, after swallowing a big chunk, she came running after me, probably wanting to kill me. Nonetheless, Eliza never came back to my house and my mom was extremely mad at me because her mom said she didn’t want to talk to my mom anymore. My mom lost a friend, my family lost their microwave, poison control lost some valuable time when we called them over a situation that could have been avoided, and I lost Eliza who turned out to be an alright person, compared to some of the other girls that my mom set playdates up with me, later.
All in all, lying isn’t worth it. Lying is bad. The lies people tell are ruining them and others, our whole society. Lies break trust and bonds that took forever to form. Lying doesn’t work out. It causes you to have to stress about keeping up with the lie and tell more lies. The lie will eventually win over the human, you know. It’ll just swallow you up, without even chewing you. The lie, I mean.
You didn’t need an ordinary girl to tell you that lying is bad, as you already knew that. So then, why is it that you lie anyway? There’s no need to. If we all just didn’t lie we could actually live in an uncorrupt world. Well, maybe. But, it would be a great giant leap for the bettering of mankind.
