Lies Upon Lies

When Georgian athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili crashed and died on the Olympics luge track last month, we were told by the International Luge Federation that the tragedy was the result of human error, not “deficiencies in the track.” This announcement came despite complaints about the track by other athletes prior to the accident and despite the subsequent moves to raise the walls where Kumaritashvili died and to change “the ice profile.”

How many of us really believed that Nodar Kumaritashvili was at fault that day? Sports commentators and bloggers around the world called out the lie, but there it hung in the air for all of us to pretend we believed.

The art of the lie has become so commonplace that it’s really no longer an art. We are lied to so much of the time that we now have the industry of fact checking, and many of us don’t think twice when we see an athlete denying obvious steroid use or a politician rewriting history.

With so much lying going on, it’s hard to know whom to believe. So we often end up believing the people we like or the ones we voted for. But this isn’t how a functioning society works. It didn’t work in junior high, why should it work now?

The trouble with lies is that, at best, they diminish the humanity in all of us. At worst, people die: the invented discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq took more lives than we will ever know.

The family and friends of Nodar Kumaritashvili should not have had to suffer the International Luge Federation’s cruel insult; their grief was exacerbated by the agency’s cowardice.

Not surprising, really, for cowardice is what lies are all about.