....you live in a toilet seat. Or so the childhood rhyme went. It made it sound really yucky and nasty to cheat.

Yet cheating is not discouraged in our culture today. In fact, it seems to be encouraged. Take, for instance, the TV program, "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?" In my challenge to find good-pure-lovely programming, I was willing to give it a try. I watched it once.

Check it out for yourself. It's a cheat fest. For instance, in order to play the game, the adult contestant can "look at a student's paper" or flat out ask him or her for the right answer. On that show there is no way to do your own work. The only way to succeed is if your classmates give you the answers. Cheating is ingrained in the very premise of the show. Sure, it may represent cooperation, and it's only an inane (insane?) TV show. Yet I wonder, how are some of the other ways that cheating is encouraged in our world?

I was at Wal-Mart the other day, (like most days, I guess.) The teenaged checkout girl was having a very, very bad day. One thing that was frustrating her was that some of my items didn't appear to have barcodes for easy scanning. After searching for a brief moment, she manually entered a series of numbers...that she made up. She muttered, "When in doubt, cheat." Is that the best we can do?

Another example. In order to successfully play videogames, the savvy gamers download shortcuts from the internet. Guess what those shortcuts are called? "Cheats." So by the time you are 8, you learn that you will never conquer a videogame with your own smarts and persistance. To keep up with your friends, you will need the "Cheats."

How about when no one is looking? Is it okay to take a short-cut, look at a friend's paper or enter a made-up bar code? Is it okay, as long as you don't get caught? The fact that we even consider the merit of that question shows how comfortable we are with cheating.

Today Alex and I were driving down the highway and Alex was driving! I was lecturing him on watching for the unexpected stops and weird situations on the road when we came across a very strange one. Several cars were stopped on
I-581 as men ran down the highway trying to desperately catch MONEY THAT WAS FLYING AROUND. On a breezy day, someone had dropped a sack of cash from a car. These men were risking their lives for that money.

Alex thought we should stop and try to collect some of the dough. We saw others stopping on both sides of the road to do just that. I said that it was unsafe (DUH!), and just money (DOUBLE-DUH.) "Besides, whatever we collect we would have to return to the owner," I intoned. Alex thought that was ridiculous. We repeated the story later to some of his teen friends and they also thought that was the stupidest thing they ever heard.

But why?

Why do they think if someone drops a sack of money on the highway, and they happen to catch some, it belongs to them?

What have we taught...or not taught them?

There's an ultimate truth and a Judge who is watching. The farther we get from that, the more we think we can take any steps we feel like in order to make our lives easier or to succeed. We lie, cheat, steal and encourage others to do the same. "Everyone is doing it," is our mantra.

"Cheat, cheat, never beat, you live in a toilet seat." Turns out those are words of prophecy.