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“Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.”   ~ Agatha Christie

Our Tanner left us last Thursday and I am in a quiet corner for awhile.

During the ten minutes that I ate my breakfast cereal this morning, I read three articles in the Boston Globe and in doing so got snapshots of four young people between the ages of 17 and 22. One of them is currently being held without bail on a charge of first degree murder. Another is wanted as his accomplice in the crime. The third was also in court yesterday, there to make some statement for the record regarding her role in a now infamous prostitution ring. And the fourth, a young woman on an academic scholarship and president of the student body of one of the best universities in our country, is dead.

I am not so cruel and heartless – nor naive – to not acknowledge that some of us are blessed by circumstances that result in our traveling very different paths in life, but the fact of four lost lives that comes through in these stories is a picture of our culture and society filled with shame.

In her story for ABC News yesterday, Susan Donaldson James describes the “mighty fall” of the soon to be former New York Governor, Eliot Spitzer, and tries to offer some explanation for his behavior (i.e. arrogance). One of her quoted sources, Mark Held, a Denver-based psychologist, sums the whole thing up – literally, because these are the very last words in the piece – by saying “It’s part of the human condition. Human beings are flawed.”

Dr. Held won’t get any argument from me on that statement. As a species, we are indeed far from perfect. However, to toss off the behavior of Mr. Spitzer and all of the other politically powerful people mentioned in this story as merely indicative of the nature of humanity is a bit much for me. Or more rightly put, it’s not quite enough.

A flaw is a blemish, a crack in one’s character. A chipped piece of glassware on the “Closeout” table. That’s flawed. The inability to keep one’s New Year’s Resolution to eat more fruits and vegetables or get more exercise. That’s a flaw. Gossip. That’s a flaw. One could say at this point that judging other people is a flaw, and in an instance like this one the temptation to judge is great. Even our inability to always tell the truth can be called a flaw, but surely there are degrees of lying and deceit that call for an entirely different adjective to describe the nature of the person who engages in such behavior. “Flaw” seems a flawed choice.