Little White Lies
Krayton Kerns
11.14.07
It was 15 years ago on Halloween eve. I was upstairs working in my office while my kids played downstairs scaring each other with a variety of rubber spiders they had hauled from school. The shrieks followed by the hysterical laughter had gone on most of the evening so I became oblivious to most of it. Nearing bedtime Chelsie, my 10 year-old, let out a scream that even woke up our St. Bernard.
“That must have been a dandy,” I thought to myself as I continued reading without looking up. The screaming grew louder as Chelsie sprinted up the stairs towards my desk. Meagan and Tyler were right behind her and neither was laughing.
“There’s a snake coiled under my pillow,” Chelsie stammered between the sobs.
I did the fatherly thing and calmly walked downstairs to her bedroom and flipped back her bed spread and pillow. Yep, she was right. Coiled neatly on the top sheet was a snake. Not a big snake. Not a poisonous snake. Not a particularly mean snake, but a live snake nonetheless and definitely somewhere you don’t expect to find snakes. I put on my gloves, grabbed the snake and headed out to the garage.
As I gave the snake a Rubbermaid burial I remembered something I noticed a couple weeks before. Our new house had done the usual settling and I spotted a sizeable crack in the caulking where the main sewer line exited the foundation wall. “I should plug that gap before some creature squirms into the crawl space,” I thought to myself as I mentally scribbled that task on my “to-do list”. I lost that list. Thinking the worst, I strolled back in the house, lifted the crawl space door and explored the darkness around the boxes of old toys, Christmas decorations and children’s books. In less than 3 minutes I found 4 more snakes.
With my hands full I headed back out to the garage for another burial. I figured this could be the start of a very, very, very, long night. If my trophy wife discovers the crawl space is full of snakes absolutely no one would get any sleep that night. Then, in a spark of sheer brilliance, a great plan blipped into my mind.
“Tyler,” I hollered into the house. “Come out here for a second.” Tyler was only five, but he was the other man of the house and I was going to need his help. “If Mom finds out the crawl space is full of snakes she is going to be a little hysterical,” I explained calmly. “We need to keep that our little secret. Do you know what a little white-lie is?”
“No,” Tyler replied.
“Well you are about to learn,” I shot back. “I need you to go in the house and tease Chelsie that you put the snake in her bed as a practical joke. Can you do that?”
“Okay,” he said with a level of determination that made me think we might actually make this work. We walked in the house.
Tyler’s performance was magnificent. He was laughing and poking at his sister and was so convincing that I believed he actually did place the snake under her pillow. Then his mother came around the corner and things went south real fast. She jumped in the middle of Tyler with a voracious verbal lashing. It was then I noticed the chin wrinkling and the lower lip quivering and I knew we were seconds away from tears. Tyler looked like he might cry too. Our little snake white-lie exploded so I am going to drop it right there and switch to another white-lie I am seeing in newspapers concerning our state government. Think about this:
*You overpaid your tax bill by $1.4 billion dollars, so the Governor gave $0.1 billion back and spent $1.3 billion…on your behalf.
*One beneficiary of your generosity was the Department of Corrections (DOC). Their budget increased $105 million (43%).
*The leading cause for increased incarceration is substance abuse.
*The Rimrock Foundation program is so effective the Yellowstone Co. Detention Facility doesn’t have enough offenders to economically continue the substance abuse program.
*Although the offender population is down and the DOC has $3.5 million left over, they are projecting 528 offenders beyond capacity for ’08, 998 beyond for ’09.
*The private Two Rivers Detention Facility in Hardin has 464 empty beds.
*The Attorney General says we have no need for additional prison beds and the legislature prohibits Hardin from contracting for out of state offenders. So, Hardin remains empty.
*Legislative Interim Committees are meeting around the state to discover what we can do to stimulate economic development.
*Since July, the Law & Justice Interim Committee has heard 24 hours of testimony with the common theme the DOC needs more funding.
Is this making sense to anyone? Somewhere in the above 9 statements is a political white-lie but I will be danged if I can figure out who or where it is. This is exactly what happens with bigger government; send your money to Helena and they spend it. Perhaps we are white-lying to ourselves?
