Truthfulness is basic to honesty, yet we live in a society where truthfulness is often in short supply. We have institutionalized deceit in our culture. From the highest offices in the land to our mass media and social media, lying is an accepted form of discourse. If there is no penalty for lying what does that say about the value of honesty in our society? To an impressionable observer like a young person, it appears honesty is for suckers.

How are young people to learn the value of telling the truth when pop-culture, political correctness, fake news and ‘the end-justifies-the-means’ ethics all condone parsing words, shading meaning, spinning wrongs, twisting truth and ignoring inconvenient fact? It starts with parents who expect kids to tell the truth and have the courage to expose deceit wherever they find it. That’s a tough assignment these days when so much of society and media inundate kids with falsehood and deceit.

It helps if kids have heroes and role-models who reinforce the value of honesty. For many of us who grew up in the fifties and sixties our heroes were straight talking cowboys. They practiced a code of conduct that became quintessentially American. We revered and respected heroes who stood for honorable values. Who are the heroes our young people look up to today? Rock stars? Super star athletes? Cartoon characters? The video game actors under their thumbs? What code of conduct do these ‘role models’ stand for? Chances are when you catalog a kid’s heroes today, you won’t find a cowboy among them. Maybe we should hold a few up.

Popular culture comes and popular culture goes, but the cowboy way of doing things never goes out of style. There’s a little cowboy in all of us. The Cowboy Code helps us find it.

1. Cowboys Tell the Truth.

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Ride easy, Photo-art by Jim Hatzell
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