Never the full story

A lot of dissension is reaped in the real world because none of us ever have the full story. We've seen it going on for the past five years in our government and by our people because we don't want to acknowledge that there even is another side, much less listen to it.

But what's more important to our daily, personal lives is how we do the same thing with each other. Few of us ever know the whole truth about a situation, person, job or relationship so we base our opinions and perspectives on what we DO know and spread it to others as if it was the absolute truth. I hear it every day from friends, colleagues, and students and you probably get your news about other people much the same way.

We all love juicy gossip don't we? We love to take the latest rumors we hear about someone and tell anyone we know because we like to be the transmitters of information that others don't know about. We don't stop to think about the dangers inherent in doing that because it's so much fun for us to tell somebody something they don't know. The problem is we may not know it either because the person or people we got the story from weren't the people who were actually involved. So, at best, we're spreading a partial story and at worse, a false story that may damage the life of the person we're talking about.

I don't think many of us think about this consciously when we do it. Small towns are, for the most part, friendly places where most of the folks try to get along with each other. But at the same time, it seems like we feel obligated to spread stories about each other.

When a company or corporation fires an employee, the other employees are usually notified through email. But the reasons for the dismissal are never mentioned. Typically, it's a short little missive that says that the person's employment has ended, effective immediately. And because there are no details, the rumor mill starts immediately. People congregate in twos and three or more, in the hallways and by the water fountain, postulating about what happened to this person and coming up with their own personal theories. Now that could be prevented by a full disclosure of the details surrounding why that person is no longer employed. But no company in America releases those details because of confidentiality factors involving the employee and the company and the fear of being sued. The consequence of that is when we don't have the facts, we make them up.

A similar thing happens in relationship breakups and the fallout is that several people who once liked us don't like us anymore because of the negative things they've heard about us from the other person. It's too bad that we have to become bitter and vengeful when a break-up occurs but it seems like that's what most people do. And when we act that way, we not only poison our friend's perspective of the other person, we do the same thing to our own and that's never a good thing. It's always amazing to me how people in a relationship can go from ecstasy to misery in such a short period of time but we see it happening almost every day. And it's usually because few people have the personal integrity to be responsible for their own actions and, consequently, refuse to shoulder any of the blame. Very few things are one person's fault completely with no complicity by the other person at all but we sure paint that picture to others and even to ourselves.

And as long as we keep doing that, this will be a worse world to live in than it could have been.