It ain’t me, babe

 

Monday, February 16, 2015

 

The old Sonny and Cher song has been caught up in my head all weekend. This is what happens when you have to duck accusations of corruption when as the song says, “it ain’t me, babe.”

We’re supposed to be able to separate ourselves from our personal opinions. And while we can’t totally do so, we shouldn’t dive in and indulge our prejudices either.

This is the problem with being small town in a big city, where little fish often get swallowed up by big fish or at best get manipulated into doing things we know as wrong.

So I should buy a rubber stamp with the old song’s lyric to make sure that those who make the final judgment on people like us, know that I’m not one of the perpetrators of this hoax.

When they come to me and ask: “Why did you do this?”

I send them on to those who did, refusing to get in the cross fire of what I know is utterly wrong.

This is not the first time either, nor will it be the last.

In this environment of hazy ethics, sometimes the only thing you can do is duck, and hope that the right people on all sides of a conflict hit themselves, and that in the end, I won’t need more than my usual morning shower to feel clean again.

An old friend from when I first started in this business used to have a saying, “pond scum always rises to the top.”

I didn’t know what he meant at the time, but now I do, which is probably why I’m where I am.

It ain’t me, babe.