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Fool Me Once, Shame on You, But Fool Me Twice….
From bold-faced lies to misrepresentation – facts that aren’t facts, withholding information, skirting the code of ethics, and shades of truth – honesty and the advocacy business have been on my mind. I’m eager to hear your opinion on the subject, too. My thought process was actually triggered by something that has nothing to do with advocacy at all, something that seems relatively innocuous, but then, maybe not-so-innocuous at all: the purchase of a 5-lb bag of sugar to bake holiday cookies last December. Now a 5-lb bag of sugar has always been a 5-lb bag of sugar and has yielded a certain number of batches of cookies. I’ve been buying 5-lb bags of sugar all my baking life, so I grabbed the bag off the shelf at the store as I do every December, knowing that cookie baking was in my near future. Except that this time, that 5-lb bag of sugar was (you guessed it) only 4 lbs! It didn’t cost any less, but it had 20% less sugar in the bag. Yes, it was labeled correctly, and no, I had not read it carefully enough. But that is SO FAR beside the point. Old habits die hard. So now? I will never trust that store again when it comes to purchasing sugar – or anything else that I have trusted to be of a certain size. Sugar isn’t the only problem. Many other kinds of foods, including cereal, frozen vegetables, orange juice, pre-packaged produce and meats. A pound is still a pound, but a package that has always been a certain size is rarely that size anymore. Fool us all! That cummupence got me to thinking about other places in life where things are not what they seem to be. For example – the healthcare system. For people of a certain age or older, the healthcare system was always accessible and available, provided what we needed when we needed it, through kindly and knowledgeable providers, and at an affordable price (or no cost at all.) But now, in 2016, that healthcare system no longer exists – not…