Denials Du Jour

You know, that's one of the sad things about our society - we make it so people basically have to lie, and quite often. It's to the point where we know they are lying, they know they are lying, but it has to be said because of some legal or PR issue. I have a friend who was applying for health insurance (seriously: a friend, not a "friend"). When she came to the part that asked whether or not she'd ever done an illegal drug in her life, she did the honorable thing and left it blank. A week later she got a phone call from a nice guy at the insurer, who told her that blank box was holding up her insurance. He said he needed an answer before the form could be processed. Being an apparently decent person, he also said to her, "If you check "yes" on that box, you won't get insurance, from us or from anyone else. Knowing that, which box would you like me to check?" Okay, now that's just dumb and sad, that we can't admit that someone might have had a joint at one point in their life without causing them to be uninsurable, and forcing them to sign a lie in order to be able to access life-saving measures. It's dumb and sad that people have to pretend they are not considering a run for office or the procurement of an entire company until they are actually doing it. I feel like it's another part of us giving up on actually doing things, and worrying more about how they appear. Here in California, buildings have to have a sign on them that the building "may contain chemicals known to the state to have chemicals that may be harmful to your health." Seriously. When we start wasting our energy requiring signs that buildings *might* contain something that *might* be harmful, we have stopped progress. When we live in a fantasyland where we make people go through 3 hour security lines rather than accepting the obvious - that any idiot could simply blow up the line itself with an entire suitcase full of C4, negating all that security - we are failing to be good human beings and letting ourselves be idiots. And some idiot will probably put me on a watchlist for even saying the obvious publically. A few years ago, I stood by (the alternative was getting arrested) as the contents of an entire 400,000 square foot warehouse - printers, computers, all the way down to the brand new pallet racking, were destroyed because lawyers and accountants decided that the write off was worth more than the sale value, and that even giving all that stuff away would be a liability. That's just wrong. And these PR people are just wrong. We need to call a spade a spade, because it's getting to the point where the biggest lie we tell is the one about us being the land of the "free" and the "brave".