By J. Douglas Stevens
Staff Columnist
All right, I told you I would keep it fresh, but I didn’t say anything about keeping it real. This previously popular colloquialism suggested that once you made the big time (became famous) you would still support your “hood” (hometown). Instead of selling out and buying into the collective lie, you stay true to your roots and remember your humble beginnings.
I’m going to simplify the phrase’s meaning to be just plain honest. How many of us keep it real?
Seriously. Someone says, “Hi, how are you?” You – stressed, depressed and unprepared for your test – muster a genuinely fake smile and say, “Fine,” and then go about your business.
But social decencies don’t count, right? After all, you don’t have time to play psychotherapist with every Tom, Dick and Sally.
Lie #1 – justified. A relatively insignificant lie, but a lie just the same. And we don’t just lie to other people; we also lie to ourselves.
“Sleep well last night?” I asked myself this morning. “I had a hard time getting to sleep now that I mention it. Too much noise. The people upstairs were moving furniture … Seems like they re-arrange their room almost every night.”
I don’t know why we lie to ourselves (actually I do, that’s a lie too), maybe we just don’t want to believe the truth. Maybe we live in an environment that fosters the lies we create.
One lie is that Pepperdine residents are not having sex and will continue not having sex until they are married. We pay large dollars to (whether we like it or not) reside in quaint, quiet and clueless quarters. Benefactors of the university could be compelled to close their wallets if they thought Pepperdine students were behaving with promiscuous immorality.
Lie #2 – justified. Remember when you first got your driver’s license and your mother wanted to know your every move? “Where are you going? What will you be doing? Who is going to be there?” You tell her what she wants to hear and conveniently leave out buzz words such as drugs, alcohol and promiscuous sex. Lies of omission can sometimes be the most damaging.
I know it’s difficult to stay truth-oriented in the land of “lights, camera, action.” Our culture’s most precious industry uses staged and scripted lies as vehicles of conveying ideas of social truth. Isn’t it ironic? What would become of the world if people meant what they said and said what they meant? What if we all dealt with reality as it is, instead of how it should be? I’m sure many would be offended, some disappointed, but we would all be better human beings because of it, right? The lies we are busy spinning act as horse blinders, narrowing our vision and lessening the likelihood that any sort of truth will ever be realized.
After spending a year living off campus, through the infamous canyon, I’m back in Malibu, in the cozy Lovernich Apartments.
“How do you like living on campus?” is a question I hear just about daily.
“It’s great!” I tell them. “No alcoholic beverages or controlled substances to cloud my mind, no females to tempt my sinful desires late at night and no harmful second-hand cigarette smoke to pollute my lungs (save a few designated areas).”
The day I moved into my apartment less than a month ago, you will be glad to know, there wasn’t a used condom near the dumpster and I didn’t have to step over it every time I carried a load in from my car (and I seriously doubt that the abandoned prophylactic came from our health center). But, you don’t want me to keep it real, do you?
September 25, 2003