When I think of telling the truth, I get a picture in my head of a child being punished and the parent saying, “if you tell me the truth, you won’t be in trouble.” All throughout childhood we are rewarded for telling the truth and even sometimes as adults. For example, a suspect of a crime might be offered a lessened sentence if he agrees to talk. This happens every day in this country. One example of this, even though it is a movie, is Law Abiding Citizen. The suspect brutally rapes and murders a family, but gets away with a few years for talking. Another example is the way police deal with drug dealers. Say the police catch a cocaine dealer, they can easily get a sentence of 8 years, but just by the dealer saying a few names, somehow the sentence gets reduced to one or two. As children we are also always told that when we lie, our conscience will know and it will eat away at us until we tell the truth. Personally, I do not like to think of the conscience as anything spiritual, but rather conditioned. Generally, when I think of telling the truth, I also think of the classic devil and angel on the shoulders, truth vs. lies, good vs. bad, right vs. wrong and so on. Not only do we need to tell the truth to authority figures, we also need to tell ourselves the truth. In my opinion, lying to yourself is one of the most destructive things anyone can do.
When I think of troublemakers, I think of simply going against societies norms. This means, to me at least, that whether you are a drug dealer, bank robber, extortionist, j-walker, or murderer that you fall in the same category, which is a troublemaker. Troublemakers do not always have to be breaking the law or doing something wrong though. If a group got together to overthrow the government because they think the government is getting to powerful, does that make them troublemakers even though the founding fathers gave us the right to bear arms specifically for this reason? I do not think so for the same reason that I do not think the pilgrims were troublemakers. Yes, they went against societies norms, but I do not think this should classify them as troublemakers. But what about lawbreakers? Surely, if you break the law then you must be a troublemaker and again I disagree. I disagree for the fact that sometimes the socially wrong decision, is also the morally correct one. The classic example of this is to picture a man whos wife is dying. There is a cure for her disease, but the man does not have enough money to afford it so he breaks into the pharmacy and steals it. This man is breaking the law, but I would not classify him as a troublemaker. We are not robots, so everything is not black and white. There are some exceptions that come into play because as humans we have morals and the ability to reason.
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