Category: Crime and Punishment

Is Elizabeth Holmes the Face of Fraud or Failure?

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If Elizabeth Holmes could’ve had an idea that worked, she could’ve been a contender, she could’ve been something real, and oh, the places she could’ve gone. The idea that we’re fascinated with this woman is obvious with all of the bios, documentaries, and news segments devoted to her. There are probably hundreds of different answers as to why, but I think it has something to do with the idea that her story is not a simple ‘person perpetuates fraud’ story. 


Elizabeth Holmes was found guilty by a jury of her peers of perpetuating fraud. That’s a fact, and the glaring headline, and it might influence everything we learn about her story. Her story is just the latest in the ever-present, not-going-to-end-anytime-soon Cringe-TV. We love to laugh, cry, and scream in horror, but we also love to cringe. There’s probably something wrong with it, as we shouldn’t love it this much, but when someone gives all their money to a con artist, and then they convince their friends and family to give their money to them too, we cringe with excitement. Do we think we’re better than the victims? If we did, we wouldn’t develop crinkles (cringe wrinkles) during our obsessive binges. Our motive, when watching these shows is not to find out if the fraudsters did anything illegal, but how they did it. 


After watching all of these shows, the viewing audience should ask themselves two questions. Did the 19-year-old sophomore at Stanford drop out of college to commit fraud, and if not, what did she know and when did she know it? Did Elizabeth Holmes want to become the next Steve Jobs so bad that she was willing to do anything to make that happen? Or, did that just kind of happen in the course of her troubled venture? Even though she was eventually deceitful, the idea that Elizabeth Holmes won over some of the intellectual glitterati of our nation is a testament to her talent, intelligence, and charm. She professionally seduced George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, David Boies, James Mattis, and, of course, Theranos Chief Operating Officer Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. She also managed to secure $700 million in funding from the likes of Larry Ellison and Tim Draper. At its peak, her company Theranos, was valued at $9 billion. 


Watching Hulu’s bio Dropout, HBO’s Inventor, the 20/20 news segment, or reading any of the web articles devoted to her story involves a battle between cringes and knee-jerk reactions. One knee jerk reaction we have is to now say Elizabeth Holmes was a con artist who engaged in fraudulent activity to secure funds from investors. We then dismiss her on that basis, but how many world leaders, politicians, and other charismatic, skilled, and deceptive people have attempted to pull the wool over the eyes of those luminaries listed above? Another knee-jerk reaction is to say that Elizabeth Holmes was a young, blonde woman who had obvious appeal to old, grey men. They might have enjoyed meeting with her. They might have enjoyed her attempts to professionally seduce them, but what happened when those meetings ended? A cadre of advisors probably sat down with the old, grey men and poured through her books, and they had a pro and con discussion with a George Shultz. He took their advice under consideration, and he ended up believing her. At one point in the story, Shultz even believed Holmes over his own grandson. How many years of experience did George Shultz, and all of the names listed above, have dealing with con artists and fraudsters? What does that say about them that they fell for Elizabeth Holmes’ deception, and what does it say about her? If she had a product that actually worked, imagine how real her success could’ve been. 


The Theranos Corporation had a machine called the Edison, so named because lightbulb inventor Thomas Edison said, “I didn’t fail 10,000 times. The lightbulb was an invention with 10,000 steps.” How many careers were built out of try, try, and try again? Thomas Edison wasn’t excusing his failures. He was saying that he had to learn from the 10,000 misfires he made. Did Holmes’ Edison machine fail 10,000 times? “Who cares?” Holmes, Balwani, and all of the engineers and scientists could’ve answered. “Who cares if it fails 100,000 times. Imagine if we keep failing, and we learn everything there is to learn from those failures? Imagine if, one day, it works. We could transform the landscape.” The central question in this fiasco, to my uninformed mind, is is it possible that the Edison would have ever worked? If not, then we have beginning-to-end, no excuses, and full-fledged fraud on our hands, but what if Walgreen’s didn’t push for its arrival in their stores? What if Holmes and Balwani hadn’t pushed the engineers to make the Edison happen to satisfy Walgreen’s? Was it ever possible? Were the talented engineers and all of the employees they had on the payroll at Theranos for the money, or did they believe in Holmes’ dream? 


The Hulu bio Dropout depicts biochemist Ian Gibbons, who served as the chief scientist of Theranos, complaining that the Edison “is just not ready” for Walgreen’s. He was the first experienced scientist Holmes hired, his name was on all of the patents, and from everything we read about Gibbons, he was more than a believer. He was one of the chief architects of Holmes’ vision. The portrayals of Gibbons on the 20/20 story, the Hulu bio, and the HBO documentary The Inventor, suggest he was never a naysayer. They suggest that he just set rigorous benchmarks for the product. He doesn’t say, at any point, that this was a fictional dream that Holmes concocted (as a Stanford professor did), that it’s a fraud perpetuated on investors and the public, or that it will never happen. With all of his experience in the field of biochemistry, Ian Gibbons believed in the product, but he said it was just not ready to meet Walgreen’s timeline. There was a certain duality to Gibbon’s pleas however. He needed a job. He was in poor health, and he needed the health insurance that Theranos provided.  


What if they waited? Could they have waited? Would the money dry up if they delayed yet again? The stories of Elizabeth Holmes depict her as someone who had a natural gift for raising money. Could she continue to raise money at such a blinding pace, or were her chickens coming home to roost?  


Now that we know Elizabeth Holmes was successfully convicted of fraud, our knee-jerk reaction is to believe that the whole venture, from beginning to end, involved a years-long series of deceitful acts. Suggesting otherwise insults our intelligence. The details of her ambition suggest this whole venture was narcissism as opposed to altruism. Now that we all know this was a fraud, we tint our rose-colored glasses with such a heavy dark tint that we can’t see anything else. Did Holmes believe in this idea, at one point, or was she so desirous of her own Steve Jobs image that she would do anything to get it? In that light, she’s rightly depicted as a narcissist, but did she wear black turtle necks and lower her voice to become the next Steve Jobs, or were these façades her attempts to have the world take a 19-year-old (or however old she was at the time) blonde seriously, so she could sell an altruistic product to the masses, to save lives?   


In a fascinating, possible explanation of Elizabeth Holmes’ motivation for continuing “the lie”, behavioral economist Dan Ariely discusses a psychological experiment using a standard, six-sided die in the HBO documentary on this story The Inventor. In this experiment, the subject of the test is encouraged to predict the number of pips that will appear when the research scientist rolls the dice. One of the twists in this experiment is that the subject gets to pick the top or the bottom of the die, after the roll is complete. They keep that prediction, whether top or bottom, in their head. They don’t say it aloud. The scientists will give them a dollar for every pip on the die that appears with a correct prediction. If the number is one, they get one dollar, two for two, and six dollars if the number appears, top or bottom. In some cases, the die displayed one pip on the top and six on the bottom. “Which one did you pick?” the scientists ask, “The top or the bottom?”  


“The bottom,” they said, when the six was on the bottom.  


“Are you sure?”  


“Yes, I picked the bottom that time.” Boom, six dollars went into the subject’s pocket. In the next stage of the experiment, they are hooked up to a lie-detector to find that they lie some of the time to get the most money they can. The third part of their experiment involved charity. “All of the proceeds from a correct guess go to charity,” they informed the subjects. The scientists found that the subjects’ lies went up dramatically when the reward for their correct guesses went to charity.  


If Elizabeth Holmes genuinely believe Theranos was an altruistic venture that would eventually help save lives, then what was the harm of a few lies here and there? We all lie, and most of us lie for narcissistic reasons. What if we genuinely believed we could revolutionize the world, and as Holmes continually suggested we could spare our proverbial brothers and sisters from having to say goodbye to the world too soon? Would we fudge the numbers, lie to investors, and treat obnoxious employee questions the way Theranos did if it could buy a little time to see our dream actually come true?  


Elizabeth Holmes was told that this will never work by one of the Stanford professors she approached with her the idea. Our knee-jerk reaction, knowing what we know now is, why didn’t she listen? How many ingenious minds are told such things at the outset? Then we learn that another esteemed Stanford professor compared her to Mozart, Beethoven, Newton, Einstein, and da Vinci. Others said she might be the next Archimedes.  


Elizabeth Holmes had a childhood fear of needles, and she thought the products she and her team created at Theranos could spare future sufferers of this fear. She also thought that she could transform the medical industry. At some point, her dream ran into reality, which begs the old Watergate question: “What did she know, and when did she know it?” When she encountered Edison’s 10,000 failures with the Edison machine, she pushed on. Why did she push on? Did she believe in this machine, and this dream, that much? Or, was she in too deep? The cringe takes hold when the main character not only continues to lie, but she doubles down. “Why would you do that?” our cringe asks. “When it’s plainly obvious that you’re trying to swim out of a sand hole.”


How much pressure was Holmes under at this point? She had 800 employees counting on her, numerous investors, and friends and family counting on her to make this happen? She appeared on the cover of Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg, and Inc. Magazine. She appeared on CNBC a number of times, spreading her gospel. How many of us could experience this level of adulation, coupled with the pressure that it entails, and say, “All right, well, we’ve failed ten thousand times, over the course of ten some odd years, and well, it looks like this thing doesn’t work, and it never will. Everyone can go home now. There’s nothing more to see here. We’re folding up shop folks, it’s now time to go home.” 


In the midst of our knee-jerk reactions and hours-long cringes, we turn to our wives and say, “At that point, right there, I would’ve been more forthcoming.” To which, our wife should’ve said, “And then what?” And then, after you’ve cleared your name of any fraud by declaring the dream over, everything is over. Everyone you know and love realizes that you’re not the golden child they thought you were yesterday. You’ll become a punchline, as everyone you know will begin to mimic and mock your forthcoming statement, and the life you knew for ten-plus years is over as you spend the rest of your life realizing that you peaked at thirty-years-old.   


Among the top CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, there is one characteristic common among them an uncommon belief in self. If Holmes shared this enviable trait, as many suggest she did, she believed she could overcome any obstacle before her, and to do so there are times when we might have to fudge and fib a little to encourage the skeptical and skittish around to trust our unwavering vision just a little bit longer? An edited number here and there to encourage the legions of media members and employees who worshipped you will mean nothing when this product finally reaches completion. When Theranos employees on the ground floor begin to ask questions, it’s fine, as long as they don’t discourage their fellow employees and spread poor morale. As long as they don’t violate their NDAs and speak to the press or their family and friends, we’ll be fine. Plus, forcing employees to sign NDAs is a common practice in Silicon Valley and the rest of the business world. Furthermore, the best CEOs learn to lean on some level of obfuscation to sidestep deep, penetrating questions regarding initial results of products during their gestational period. Did Elizabeth Holmes have an unwavering and uncommon belief in herself or her products, in a manner those in sales will say are one and the same?


*** 


“I’m not going to fall for this,” we say when we click on the app to watch an episode of Cringe-TV. We know the perpetrator has been convicted, and we know some of the details of the case, but we want to see the suffering. We want to see the faces of the people who were duped, and we want to laugh at them when they confess the extent of the betrayal went from hundreds to hundreds of thousands, and if we’re really lucky, we’ll see the face of that poor sap who dumped millions. We might see something wrong with us for enjoying it so much, but we keep watching.  


I just can’t wrap my arms around Elizabeth Holmes being a fraudster from beginning to end. As a former fraud investigator, I know she’s been convicted of fraud by a jury of her peers, but I can’t help but think Elizabeth Holmes believed in her idea for a majority of those twelve years and presumed 10,000 failures. I know many of the facts of the case, but I would love to know what happened to her when it became obvious that her products were never going to work. Did she and her team switch to Siemans’ products, and all of the other measures she used to allegedly defraud victims, or was she desperately seeking more time. Or did she fear that “What then?” question if she was totally forthcoming at some point.    

Fraud is perpetuated throughout our country on a daily basis from Silicon Valley to Bangor, Maine. How many of these acts are committed for purely narcissistic reasons, and how many of these paths are paved with altruistic intentions? We might never know what was going on in Elizabeth’s head throughout the trials and tribulations she experienced, and our knee-jerk reaction is to shut down all discussion on the matter with the fraud conviction, but think about what an incredible person Elizabeth Holmes could’ve been if she devoted all of the energy, talent, and intelligence that impressed so many luminaries of our society into something that actually worked.   

The other side of the coin, the elephant in the room that no one wants to discuss is that Elizabeth Holmes was a woman. Going through all the interviews of her investors, and all the luminaries who invested in her company, I couldn’t get that fact out of my head. Elizabeth Holmes was obviously charismatic, she had a excellent work ethic, oodles of talent, and she had unwavering belief, but would all these people, including the financial magazines who had her image on the cover of all of their magazines, have fallen for her claims if she was a regular forty-something male CEO making substantial and exciting claims? We can only speculate, of course, but I think the idea that she was a woman relaxed some concerns. They wanted her to succeed, and they wanted to be the ones who were so open-minded that they didn’t want to be the type to speculate that her claims were just unrealistic, because that might subject them to the “Are you saying all this, because she’s a woman?” charge. We’ll never know, of course, but I have to think that a regular fella wouldn’t have received the benefit of doubt.

Guiteau Gets Garfield

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“I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts … Arthur is President now,” an assassin named Charles Julius Guiteau said after shooting the 20th President of the United States, James Abram Garfield in the back at the Baltimore and Potomac Railway station in Washington D.C., on July 2, 1881. (New York Herald, July 3, 1881).  

Charles Guiteau believed he played an instrumental role in the presidential election of James Garfield, and he thought the administration owed him a job. He believed he was a Stalwart, a hard working, supporter of the cause, and when the administration decided not to reward him for his efforts, he decided to shoot the president. He dressed the motive up later, saying that he was on a mission from God to save the party and the country, but the motive that drove him to borrow money for a gun, practice target shooting, and stalk the president arose because the president wouldn’t give him a job.  

There are no records of a meeting between Garfield and Guiteau, so there were no personal rejections, but Garfield’s Secretary of State told Guiteau to “Never bother me again about the Paris consulship so long as you live.” There are also no records of a direct relationship between Guiteau’s annoying persistence and the Garfield administration’s decision to end the practice of offering positions to Stalwarts, also known as the patronage or spoils system. Ending this practice, encouraged Guiteau to believe he should assassinate a president.  

Why did Charles Guiteau do it? What drove this man to want to commit such a violent? What was his motive? Inquiring rubberneckers of history want to know. We could say people just have a natural curiosity, but that would suggest that once we have our answer, we all walk away. We’re obsessed with serial killers, mass murderers, psychopaths, sociopaths, and assassins. We want to know what drives them to violence. 

Is our drive to find out what drove them all about intrigue, or do we have a motive behind wanting to know the motive? Who cares why a man kills people? Who cares why a man tries to assassinate a world leader? Some suggest that if we know the motive, we might be able to prevent future incidents of a similar nature. To do that, we need to understand the criminal mind. To do what? What if the violent perpetrator has no motive? What if he lies? What if he realizes that assassinating a president, because that president wouldn’t give him a job is a pretty stupid reason to kill a man? What if he invents a motive to assign some level of importance to what he did? What if the truth is that he always wanted to commit a random act of violence?  

Do we appreciate it when a killer provides a specific motive for his actions? Does knowing a motive provide us some level of comfort? Some accept the fact that someone shot a bunch of people, because a dog told him to do it. It’s better to believe that than it is to think that they did it because they just wanted to commit a random act of violence.   

In service to his Stalwart duties, Guiteau gave poorly attended speeches on candidate Garfield’s behalf. The audience to these speeches suggest Guiteau thought President Ulysses S. Grant was going to seek a third term. They thought he simply crossed out the name Grant and replaced it with Garfield. They said this because Guiteau accidently attributed Grant’s accomplishments to Garfield. The mentally unstable Guiteau still believed he proved instrumental in Garfield’s victory, and he wrote numerous letters to Garfield, and he visited the White House and the State Department numerous times, to argue that they should reward him for his efforts with a position in Garfield’s administration. When these efforts failed, the narcissist Guiteau decided he needed to assassinate the president to save his party and his land. 

“[S]aved my party and my land. Glory hallelujah!” Guiteau wrote in a poem he recited, as his last words before execution. “But they have murdered me for it, and that is the reason I am going to the Lordy.”  

Before the assassination attempt [Guiteau] wrote an “Address to the American People,” making the case for Garfield’s assassination. In his address, Guiteau accused Garfield of “the basest ingratitude to the Stalwarts” and said the president was on a course to “wreck the once grand old Republican party.” Assassination, Guiteau wrote, was “not murder; it is a political necessity.” He concluded, “I leave my justification to God and the American people.”  

Guiteau wrote a second justification for his planned assassination or, as he called it, “the President’s tragic death.” Guiteau, claiming himself to be “a Stalwart of the Stalwarts,” wrote that “the President … will be happier in Paradise than here.” He ended his note with the words, “I am going to jail.” 

Guiteau arrived at the station about 8:30. He felt ready for the job, having practiced his marksmanship on a riverbank on the way to his destination. Garfield entered the nearly empty station at 8:25 with Secretary Blaine and a bag-carrying servant. They walked several steps into the carpeted “ladies’ waiting room” when Guiteau fired his first shot. It grazed Garfield’s arm. Guiteau moved two steps and fired a second shot. The bullet entered Garfield’s back just above the waist. The president fell as the back of his gray summer suit filled with blood. 

After shooting the president, Guiteau tried to calm the onlookers, “It’s all right, it’s all right,” he said before the police officer on duty arrested him. 

“I did not kill the President,” Guiteau said during his trial. “The doctors did that. I merely shot him.” Though a laughable defense in a criminal proceeding, historians suggest that when used as a defense against execution in a murder in the first-degree case, it might merit some consideration. Esteemed historians, such as Candace Millard, author of the excellent Destiny of the Republic, suggests that if President James A. Garfield’s doctors did nothing, Garfield might have recovered. Her assumption is based on the idea that the doctors who attempted to locate Guiteau’s bullet were untrained in Listerian antiseptic methods that would be in widespread use a decade later. Historian, and Garfield biographer, Allan Peskin disagrees. He stated, “That medical malpractice did not contribute to Garfield’s death; the inevitable infection and blood poisoning that would ensue from a deep bullet wound resulted in damage to multiple organs and spinal bone fragmentation.” An autopsy identified the cause of death as a rupturing of an aneurysm in the splenic artery. 

In the hours after his arrest, Guiteau acted strangely. On the way to city jail with a police detective, Guiteau asked the officer if the detective was a Stalwart. When the detective replied that he was, Guiteau promised to make him chief of police. In jail, he balked at removing his shoes, complaining that if he walked barefoot over the jail’s stone floors “I’ll catch my death of cold.” When a photographer snapped his photo, he demanded a royalty payment of $25.  

Prosecutor John K. Porter demanded to know whether Guiteau was familiar with the Biblical commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” Guiteau responded that in this case “the divine authority overcame the written law.” He insisted, “I am a man of destiny as much as the Savior, or Paul, or Martin Luther.” 

Guiteau approached his hanging with a sense of opportunity, but he eventually abandoned his plan to appear for the event dressed only in underwear (to remind spectators of Christ’s execution) after being persuaded that the immodest garb might be seen as further evidence of his insanity. 

The problem for Guiteau, as it applied to a first-degree murder case, was that he displayed the characteristics of malice and forethought. He stalked President Garfield, he practiced shooting the gun he purchased at a riverbank, and he abandoned a previous attempt to assassinate the president, because the president was with his wife at the time, and Guiteau didn’t want to upset the wife.  

The trial of Charles Julius Guiteau was what some call “the most celebrated insanity trial of the century” with many alienists (psychiatrists) debating whether Guiteau was sane. Many historians, and almost all neurologists, now agree that, by today’s standards, Guiteau was clinically insane. After Guiteau’s execution, public opinion on the issue of insanity shifted.  

Although modern and future readers, who sit in the proverbial jury room, might sympathize with some of the antiquated measures used to determine sanity in 1881, but they might also calculate some of Charles Guiteau’s premeditated calculations into the equation. Months prior to the 100-year anniversary of Guiteau’s assassination attempt (March 30, 1981), John Hinkley provided a case similar to Guiteau’s, as Hinkley premeditated his assassination attempt (on President Ronald Reagan), and he did not kill the president either (reagan would live 23 more years, but Garfield died 8 weeks after Guiteau’s attempt). We might consider a stereotypical clinically insane individual to act on impulse, but the more modern jury of his peers, declared Hinkley clinically insane, and he spent 35 years in a psychiatric institution before being released. Hinkley now uploads love songs on YouTube. 

Further Reading

The Young and Stupid Clause

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“Everything I did before the age of 25 should be wiped from my personal record.” I say this now, not to void a criminal record of youth, because I didn’t have one, but to suggest that we enter into a communal agreement to expunge from our impressions everything we hear about a person before they turned 26. I’m talking about enhancing the social contracts that we all have with one another. I’m talking about developing a social contract equivalent to the state’s procedure of expunging our criminal record as a minor, depending on the charges. If we commit an egregious transgression that goes on our permanent record, socially and criminally, but I say we forgive and forget the minor transgressions a person tells us from their life before they turned 26. I propose that we develop a personal, social, and cultural young and stupid clause that states, “Anything and everything we do before the age of 26 is officially off the record. We will not think any less of you, based on what you did before that tender age, and because I was as as young and stupid as you were at the time.”

We can laugh at one another. We can picture their mini-mes making character-defining decisions, and we “I just can’t picture you doing that!” one another with some judgment. When the laughter dies, however, I propose that we forget it all under the “but you were young and stupid” umbrella, because we were all young and stupid once, and most of us became old and wise as a result.

We naturally excuse any actions that occur before 18, because that’s when most of us were truly young and truly stupid, but neurologists write, “brain development likely persists until at least the mid-20s – possibly until the 30s.” Based on that theory, I say we personally extend that agreed upon consideration we have for one another to all actions that occur before age 26.

I still cringe when I think about how incredibly stupid I was. I’m no award-winning intellect now, but I’ve come a long, long way since my 26th birthday. I managed to disprove the state’s idea that a 16-year-old is responsible enough to sit behind the wheel, and every weekend thereafter, I proved that a 21-year-old is not old enough, or mature enough to handle alcohol. Thanks to the statements neurologists make on this subject, I cringe a lot less now, and I feel less shame for the things I did before 26, under the umbrella that my brain was far less developed and mature than I thought it was.

Age is a relative concept, females generally mature quicker than males, and some males mature quicker than others will. When I look back now, I tend to think I’m looking back at another person, and in many ways I am. I am almost completely different than I was then. If 180 degrees is completely different, I might be 170 degrees different.  

When the Mental Health Daily (MHD) website cites the earlier statement from a group of neurologists, it lists a number inhibitors that further delay brain development until “possibly the 30s” including alcohol abuse, chronic stress, poor diet, relationship troubles, social isolation, and sleep problems. The 25-30 me might raise my hand to all of the above, as I don’t think I explored the advantages of maturity until I approached my 29th birthday. One other inhibitor they don’t add, but I do, is parental stress. Some of us had parents who mercilessly pounded maturity, responsibility, and overall development into our heads, and we naturally spent our teens and twenties spent rebelling against those edicts.

I still don’t know what I was rebelling against when my dad wasn’t around, but my beacon revolved around the line, “What are you rebelling against?” “Whaddya got?” from the movie The Wild One and the George Costanza line, “You wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts.”

“The prefrontal cortex doesn’t have near the functional capacity at age 18 as it does at 25,” the MHD website adds, and the writer of the article includes, “Adults over the age of 25 tend to feel less sensitive to the influence of peer pressure and have a much easier time handling it.”

I try to convince myself that I wasn’t as susceptible to peer pressure as I was. “There’s no way I did that,” I tell myself, when I know I did. I know I was young and stupid.

Those of us who were lucky enough to survive the stupidity eventually achieve a form of stair-stepping acceptance of how stupid we were that mirrors the stages of grief in some ways. These stages are relative, of course, as we all go through these stages in different ways and different times. There’s the “There’s no way I did that,” period of denial. The “Shut up, there’s no way I did that,” anger directed at people who remind us of how stupid we were, followed by a “Well, if I did that, you did this,” level of denial, and it all culminates in some depressing acceptance, “I know what I did, but I was young and stupid.”

We try to convince ourselves that we were never so stupid that we did things for the sole purpose of impressing our peers. Our thoughts go to a form of confirmation bias that permits us to view such incidents in favorable terms that highlight when we did face peer pressure down during seminal moments in our life, and we conveniently forget those moments when pleasing our peers motivated us to do some pretty stupid things. We also infuse our current, more adult ideas on peer pressure with those of our youth.  

Psychologists say that we conveniently forget horrific, tragic moments for the purpose of attaining quality mental health. Anyone who has relived the horrific details of a tragic moment in their lives, thanks to a powerful drug such as a quality dose of morphine in the hospital, knows how and why the mind selectively remembers for proper mental health. Does the mind selectively selectively misremember stupid decisions we made in our youth in the same way, so that we can live with the belief that we’ve always made rational decisions? Does this power to forget help us progress toward a final outcome of improving the ego, the self-esteem, and what have you? Is it important that we forget if we want to progress?? If that’s the case, why do we remember it one night, staring up at the ceiling at three A.M., during a mean case of insomnia. Is it as simple as we can handle it now, or does it have something to do with this idea that we’ve reached a point, in our progress, where we need to grapple with the stupidity of our youth before we continue to progress. We know we might be reaching here, and over complicating matters, but we don’t understand why we remember how stupid and vulnerable to suggestion we were, at three A.M., after conveniently forgetting about our failures for decades. 

Perhaps it has something to with another clause we should invoke whenever we hear otherwise responsible adults tell tales of utter irresponsibility and outright stupidity from their youth, the “What doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger” clause. Perhaps we need a reminder every once in a while that we should be grateful we weren’t maimed in some mental or physical ways as a result of our stupidity. Perhaps we should be grateful that we’re here to tell these tales with a relatively sound mind and body. If we have a relationship with God, perhaps we should take a moment to thank Him that we survived. Regardless who we thank, we should think about the circumstances we survived, and think about how easily they could’ve gone the other way. When we hear about young kids doing stupid things that cost them their lives, we shouldn’t dismiss them solely on the basis that they were stupid. Dismissing someone as stupid allows the purveyor of such a proclamation a pass on everything they did in their youth, without accounting for all the incredibly stupid things they did, and they just happened to survive. We should consider ourselves lucky that we didn’t suffer a similar fate, and we should tell the otherwise responsible adults as much after they’re tale is complete.  

***

I know this is going to be an unpopular statement, but a part of what kept me from ruining my faculties with an exclamation point were the state and local laws. I was not scared of police in the truest sense, but I feared what they might do to me if I did something to deserve it. If a judge asked me if I had a problem with alcohol, I would’ve said no, and I would’ve believed it. If the judge asked me if my family had a history with alcohol. I would’ve said no. Both would’ve been lies, but I would’ve said them out of fear. Why would I lie, under oath, to a judge? Look at me, do you think I’d do well in jail, and I’ve probably added forty pounds in the last twenty-five years.

“Hey, you’ve put on some weight,” a former co-worker once said, after about a decade of separation.

“In the pantheon of greetings,” I joked, “that might’ve been one of the worst I ever heard.”

“No seriously, you look like a man now,” he said. “You used to be so skinny. You used to look like a little boy.”

Can you imagine a 21-year-old, 40-lb skinnier me walking past a yard of hooting and hollering inmates? I know, child molesters receive a penalty worse than death in jail, but can you imagine if a grown, legal-aged man with child-like, waifish features walked into cellblock among convicts wrestling to control their daily urges to violate purity? The fear of what could happen if I violated those state and local laws, combined with the fictional depictions I saw of life in prison, kept me in close proximity to the straight and narrow.

I was still so out of control and stupid with non-jailable offenses that I can’t believe I’m writing to you now with something in close proximity to a sound mind. We’ve all witnessed those who whose weight is so out of control that the flap that covers their zipper has been pushed back to expose their zipper. That was me, except my struggle didn’t involve weight. It was testosterone. I had testosterone all but pushing out my pores, and I never sought a proper channel for it. How many young men, 20-25 years-old, have the good sense to channel their energy and testosterone properly?

Now, our voting public, and our state and federal representatives are dissolving and diminishing laws that might otherwise control 20-25 year-old males, who struggle to control their testosterone-fueled dreams of ruining whatever remains of their relatively immature brains.

I’ve spent the better part of this article asking that we forgive and forget the shockingly immature things we did before age 25, but we’re deciding how to vote on ballot measures, it might be better for our nation, state, and locale to remember that respect and fear of the law we had that might be one of the primary reasons why we’re here to discuss these matters. Depending on what we did in our youth, the fear of an ultimate authority figure declaring us unfit to walk around with the law-abiding citizens might recede depending on how we vote. 

Ultimately, I was the good kid and the good young man in my group who didn’t want to harm anyone but himself. Even in my small cadre of friends, I was the exception. Punching other people who deserved it, and teaching them whatever lesson they could dream up was part of the party for my friends.   

This leads to a duality some of us have on law enforcement. We don’t want our law enforcement officials wasting their precious time chasing minor offenses minor offenses around, but we don’t want young people damaging themselves any more than we damaged our minds and bodies. Those of us of a certain age no longer think the law constitutes a nefarious plot to criminalize certain behaviors to prevent young people from having a good time, but we know how far we went to have a good time, somewhere just a smidge below what we knew the law allowed. We consider most state and local laws equivalent to a governor on an accelerator to prevent young people from crashing into the walls they erect for themselves. The argument some make is that some laws make no sense anymore, but I would argue that they’re making such a declaration as a fully developed, mature adult, who is no longer as interested in skimming just under the tentative line of lawbreaking. Some argue that one law is just as bad as the other, and in some cases they’re worse, so let’s do away with a number of them, or redefine them. That argument is equivalent to suggesting that we should start our grills with white gas, because it has a flashpoint of 25 degrees, and to really get the flame going, we should add some diesel fuel, because it has a flashpoint of 126 degrees.

Some advocates of such laws worry about the children, but that’s an argument for another day. I worry about the 21-25 year-old youngsters who pursue the idea of doing whatever they want, now that they’re old enough.

This article isn’t about one law, because there are now so many of them with which I now have some concerns. This isn’t about a series of laws devoted to one topic, for it were the advocates of the behavior might pop out of the woodwork to to focus on that topic. They would probably declare me a hypocrite for indulging in the very topic for which I now oppose. I’ll say it for them, I am now a full-fledged hypocrite, and I feel fine. I still feel the pull of my anti-law youth all the time, but I know that certain laws help us define borders. If the themes of the parties I attended in my youth continue to this day, there is a lot of talk of laws. There is a lot of talk about the vague language of such laws, and how they can be exploited. We talked a lot about local, state, and federal laws, so we could know how far to push it. We wanted to live just under that line. We also knew that there was a range of violation that most law enforcement officials weren’t going to waste their time processing. Increase the range, and we increase the level of violation.  

***

As a product of permissive parenting, I could do pretty much whatever I wanted from about 15 on, but when my friends reached the age where they could do whatever they wanted, I went into overdrive.

“Are you going to the bar tonight?”

“Does the pope attend religious services?”

Our definition of being a man involved going out to the bar with the buddies and getting hammered. We didn’t invent this rite of passage. When we were young, we learned of the correlation between being drunk and being manly, don’t spread the word. We were expected to test our tolerance level every week, and we didn’t concern ourselves about failing too much, because we knew there would be a make-up test next weekend, and every weekend thereafter. Our part-time job, if we chose to accept it, and everyone we knew did, was to increase our tolerance level to the point that we might one day be like Sam Nigro in the corner over there.

“Sam can drink a gallon of beer and show no effects,” we whispered to one another, as if he was the warrior Achilles. “I saw him do it over at Pete’s house about a month ago. He drinks MD 20/20 like it’s Kool-Aid.” Sam was our Jabba the Hut. He would just sit on his proverbial pedestal with an aura of invincibility that no one could define, but no one dared challenge. He was also invulnerable to our drunken powers of suggestion, because no matter how many juicy frog drinks he downed, he never had so much as a buzz.    

No one got so hammered that a fight broke out at one of my parties. There was no sex that weekend, and no DUIs. We were all very disappointed. The next time I tried to plan a party I received polite non-committals. There was just something about the atmosphere of my apartment, the climate, or something that just didn’t invite a level of insanity to which we all grew accustomed.    

The older, more responsible citizens of various states see no problem with updating and modernizing archaic laws, because they’ve grown out of various stages. They can live their lives responsibly no matter how many temptations they update, modernize, and legalize, but as a byproduct of that they help pass laws that now allow the 21-25 year-old maniacs with testosterone dripping out of their pores, all the freedom they seek. They do make an exception for driving an automobile while intoxicated. Those are the only laws that are much stricter than they were when I was young. So, we’re now allowing our 21-25 male demo to indulge beyond their wildest dreams, and when I say dreams I’m talking literally staying up at night imagining at the ceiling that one day (like Jiminy Cricket sang) all of our dreams can come true. We’re talking about a 22 year-olds indulging beyond capacity and having the good sense not to drive home.

Now that I’m boring, old, and unflinchingly hypocritical, I hope that you’ll join me in helping me ease the decades long cringe I’ve had regarding all of the incredibly stupid things I did to tarnish my good name. Having said that, I don’t think we should help the 20-25 demographic do dumber things by diminishing and dissolving more laws that might destroy them. We tell our old people to update and modernize their thinking, and they do, but the final argument I make on this topic is to ask these modern, old people if they’re making their country, state and locale better by updating laws and choosing modern representatives? Other, older people, who have sowed their wild oats, fear being called old fogies and hypocrites, but I ask them what they would do if these new laws were passed when they were young, destructive, and self-destructive? It’s tough to remember the mindset, but if any sort of anatomical, or financial, destruction did enter my mind at the time, it wasn’t even a tertiary concern. I always thought I knew what I was doing, but now that I’m old and un-apologetically hypocritical, I now know I didn’t. I’ve now gone full circle in acknowledging that I was young and stupid.