Ethics

Around the age of 20-22, I realized that the real definition of the word ethics meant doing what you believe in your heart to be the correct, best-for-everyone thing to do in a situation, even if it means it hurts you like hell to do it.

Now, my definition had evolved - half of Kansas, please cover your ears at such language as a word like "evolved" - over the years because a lot of crackpots would tell you that's why they blew up the gynecologist, shot their spouse, or stole their neighbor's lottery ticket.

But rationalizations aside, I found myself today being offered the creme d' la creme of the titles on a publisher's "wish list" (meaning: I'd choose first which title(s) I wanted to write). One title stood out as a no-doubt bestseller.

Seriously. If I wrote this book, even without lots of marketing, I'd make some real money.

And I could use some real money.

But it's also the book I cannot write because if I write the book the way it "should" be written by the publishing world standards of today, I will feel like I ruined the lives of a small percent of people who read it.

A book can't create an addiction, of course; a book can only stimulate those with a predeliction to engage in a specific behavior.

And of course, we hear this again and again in lawsuits like "my teenager committed suicide or killed half the school" because he listened to Ozzie Osbourne (sp?) or watched "Train Spotting". That's bullshit. We can't control the press, the media etc. based on what "could" happen.

Yet it's not lawsuits that are my worry. Or people being angry.

I've taken on a few big players over the years. For a short time (2 years?), I appeared on a Christian right wing hit list for an article I wrote that appeared in Los Angeles. I've been threatened with a loaded gun and had that gun shot past me to follow up a story on a developer's efforts to fake engineering samples to claim he could build far more homes in a protected wetlands than he could. And, since the day I began to really speak out, I've had my income taxes for almost a decade computed and recomputed and such all by the feds. Strange, only happened in the Bush years.

So it's not outside interests that make me afraid to write the book.

But I can't feel good with great royalties twice a year feeling like I've contributed to big problems for people rather than finding solutions for them. I wouldn't be the one to make them do it and yet I would feel culpability in the fact I facilitated.

No, don't pat me on the head and tell me how good I am. That's not my point.

Everyday, we make choices. We all do. We have to weigh our decisions carefully.