“Where is your assignment, Mr. Smith?”

Johnny’s face flushed. With rising horror, he realized that he had “forgotten” to do his homework.

“Well?”

A thousand possible answers raced through his head at a rate that would seem impossible for a child of Johnny’s years; each reply kept getting wilder and more desperate until he finally settled on what appeared to him to be the best one.

“Um… my dog ate it.”

Let’s face it. Johnny didn’t know what else to say. How could he possibly tell his teacher what had really happened? That he had decided, consciously decided to play outside instead of doing his history assignment?

The fact is John Smith made what is known as an excuse. And that he resorted to such a thing was not entirely his fault. He was the victim of a faulty educational system, and a society that has lost nearly every ounce of moral fiber it once had in it. Mr. Smith merely did what nearly everyone had taught him to do, which was to pin the blame on anybody but himself. We will come back to Johnny later.

To start this overly zealous and exaggerated post, (though it might not be as far off from the truth as you might think) excuses have been around since the dawn of mankind, starting with caveman Ug making an excuse to his wife Delilah about why he had broken her prized rock. Excuses seem to be embedded in our DNA, an involuntary defense mechanism to avoid punishment or harm; essentially, a self-preservation technique.

Unfortunately, genuine excuses (that is, excuses that can be “backed-up”) are so totally rare that one might as well be looking for the fountain of youth in a retirement home. For example, Ug’s excuse was that he had broken the rock while defending the cave from a ravenous saber-toothed cat (this of course was ridiculous). Instead of helping him, however, this excuse happened to spark a chain reaction of events, culminating with the rock being broken a second time, over his head.

It is unknown and unfortunate why human beings continue to make excuses when they are so often unsuccessful. In this day and age, human-beings seem to believe that making an excuse for something they’ve done wrong is better instead of accepting the consequences. However, the punishment is often much worse when people lie.

Back to Johnny Smith. If he had told his teacher the truth about what he did in the right manner, she could have merely made him repeat the fourth grade. Instead, a phone call will be made to his parents, who will promptly have his dog put to sleep.

Experts say this sort of thing is going on all the time, and that we are powerless to prevent it.