David McElroy

I’ve been dealing with someone lately whose dishonesty is costing me a couple thousand dollars. Maybe a bit more.

I really want to be angry at him. I want to be bitter. I want to stone him — figuratively speaking — for what he’s done to me.

But I can’t throw this stone at him, because I’ve been a liar, too.

It’s hard for me to angrily attack someone else’s dishonesty — because my past hypocrisy shouts back and points its finger at me.

The longer I live, the more I understand that honesty is a fundamental value that goes to the core of what a person is. That sounds like something from a Boy Scout pledge or maybe a Sunday school lesson, but it’s genuinely foundational to a person’s character.

I haven’t always known this for myself, even though I would have given lip service to the principle all along.

I’ve told you before that I learned to be a very good liar as I grew up. I learned the nuances of lying — and the justifications for it — from the master liar who raised me. I was really good at it. And I didn’t see the contradiction in my life, much less the fracture it caused in my values and in my heart.

So what does all that mean when someone lies to me today?

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Were you on my website early Sunday morning — around 3:30 a.m. central time? Probably not, but if you happened to be, you would be represented on one of the dots on this map in my software showing the general location of my readers at any given moment. (The bigger the dot, the more readers from that city in that moment.)

It’s pretty cool, but it’s not especially useful. There used to be a different tool that could show me detailed information about exactly where readers were coming from during a full day (or any other period), but that tool is no longer available.

Today, I have only the vaguest notion of where my readers are coming from — and I’d really like to understand more. Would you be willing to help me? It would take only a few seconds of your time.

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When I was growing up, I was often ambivalent about sports. By the time I was a student at the University of Alabama, I was borderline-hostile about the sports that were so important to my fellow students and many of the people around me.

I was in Tuscaloosa to learn, not to waste my time with something so brain-dead. That was what I told myself. I thought I was too good — too academically pure or some such — to care about a bunch of athletes pushing themselves around in the grass.

It wasn’t until about 10 years after I left college that I started to care about football and basketball. But let’s reword that. I didn’t suddenly discover that I loved these games or the intricacies of how they were played.

I discovered that I loved my university. Quite unexpectedly, I found that keeping up with these “childish games” gave me something I craved.

It wasn’t about football. It was a sense that I was a part of something much larger than myself.

When I watched the Alabama Crimson Tide — on the field or on the court — I realized that I wasn’t just rooting for athletes. I was experiencing pride.

This was my university. This was part of who I was.

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