We used to play a game in church camp during the summer when I was growing up. Everyone would get in a circle and the youth leader would make up a sentence and whisper it into the ear of the person standing to his right.  Then he would instruct us to repeat the sentence exactly to each person's right until it made its way back to him. What do you think happened? It was unusual if the sentence whispered into the ear of the youth leader contained even one word of the original sentence.

The point of the exercise obviously was to show how stories change each time they're told until they literally have no resemblance to the original story at all. And yet we continue to spread gossip, rumor, and innuendo as if every word is the gospel truth. Many of us are so obviously bored with our own lives we can't stay out of the lives of others. Most of us love to hear a particularly "juicy" story and we absolutely can't wait to pass it on. The primary reason for that is ego. We love to be in possession of information that other people aren't yet aware of. It somehow makes us feel important.  In fact, if we start a story about someone and the person we're telling has already heard it, we feel disappointed because we wanted them to hear it from us first. I'm ashamed to say I've done the same thing. Few of us are exempt.

Another interesting aspect of telling stories about other people is that "bad" news always travels faster than good news. Sort of like the front page of a newspaper or the lead story on the nightly news. The bad news always comes first because that's what we prefer to hear and read about. Good news and success stories are almost always saved for the back section of the paper and the weekend news.  What a lot of us fail to realize, I think, is how hurtful and harmful thesestories are to people, their friends and families, and others who care about them. And once the stories start, there's no end to them. It's just like a person being arrested for a serious crime and making the front page of the newspaper. That has happened recently in southwest Nebraska. When the charges are dropped at a later point, it either doesn't make the paper at all or it's buried somewhere in the back. Most of the people in the community read the first story, few read the second one.

When we talk about people in a negative way, when we become busybodies and blabbermouths, we surely never stop to think that we are damaging and hurting other people. We tell these stories as if they are the absolute truth, never stopping to think that parts of the story or even all of the story might be false. And even if parts of the story are right, we  have no way of knowing why people make the choices in life they do. Most people are hard-pressed to even explain why they do many of the things they do themselves, much less having insight into the motivations of others. But we pretend that we do know and we have no reservations at all about sullying the names and the reputations of others even though we have no idea what's going on in their minds and hearts.

There's a pretty solid academic premise that explains a great deal of this behavior. I've written before about the power pyramid and how most of the people are in the bottom half of the pyramid. As you ascend, the room available decreases and, consequently, the number of people occupying that room decreases as well. The top of the pyramid is reserved for those people with the most wealth, power, and/or prestige. The same thing happens in the social world. We are all in competition with each other. We all have our little fiefdoms we're trying to protect. The slightest thing can often get one knocked from one level of the social pyramid to a lower level. Human beings have developed a really nasty habit of securing their own rung on the pyramid by trashing and defaming the names and reputations of others. After all, if they're doing something you're not doing, or they're doing something you have done but no one knows about, then you justify assuming a position of moral superiority over that person.

The only problem here is that we're not morally superior when we invalidate the lives of others to secure our own reputation. Because that kind of an attitude represents the dark qualities of being human. It's not a positive life-giving force. It's a destroyer of hopes, dreams, reputations, and friendships. It robs us of our humanness and provides literally no life-affirming qualities at all. And the smaller the community we live in, the worse it is.

I hope we can all become better people by refusing to pass along gossip, rumor and innuendo. I hope we can all become better people by not betraying someone's trust when they tell us something in confidence. I hope we can all become better people by looking for the good instead of always digging for the bad.

Life is tough enough without our so-called friends and neighbors making it even tougher. If we could just learn to stay our of other peoples' business and take care of our own, the world would be a much nicer place to live.