Thieves and Theft
March 8th 2007
When I was about 8 years old one day in a grocery, I went to my mother and asked her to buy a chocolate wafer bar for me. She said yes, so I kept it with me to put with the other stuff we were buying. As chance would have it sometime after we left the grocery I found the snack in my pocket and I said to my mother "Look mom I forgot to pay for this." My mom was obviously shocked and unpleasantly suprised. She took the snack opened it, broke it up in front of me and threw it away. I hungerily took this to mean that I should not enjoy the fruit of a bad action even if it was unintentional.
At the time I wondered why we didn't return to the store and pay for it, now I'm not so sure. Anyone my mother might have tried to explain the situation to might easily have decided on a whim that we should pay for more than the cost of the snack and who knows what that might have lead to. Doing the right things can often have the wrong consequences. Life isn't an episode of "Seventh Heaven"
Anyway, I don't think I ever had a stronger message in life than what my mother did so many years ago. I feel that I am obligated to pay for the things that I use and never put other people in the position of having difficulty getting what they deserve.
The idea of taking, having and keeping something that belong's to someone else just seems very discomforting and something I would have always have a problem with.
That said I've met many a person in life, as have we all, who had no problem taking things that didn't belong to them, unfortunately I never knew who they were specifically. All through my secondary school career things have turned up missing. Books, paint supplies, money, all have disappeared from where I left them, practically every year. Things went so far that I almost had to pay $80 for one book I borrowed from the library that was stolen from me. Another time I found a friend with a book I lost, he said he had gotten it from a guy who said he "raffed it from a fella"
"Raff" a euphemism for steal and a very good one at that. "Raffing" was never stealing, it didn't sound the same at all. Someone who "raffed" something wasn't a thief or a criminal they weren't anything. It wasn't even as bad as saying that you took something from someone without permission, which actually sounds bad, it was only a "raff" after all.
I haven't been an angel, I've done stuff that has hurt people in the past. I realise now that this is inevitable to some degree. Even Jesus hurt the Pharasee's feelings as well as many others. However my personal credo has been to not hurt other people if it can be avoided, because I've know what it's like to be hurt. Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I fail.
At the end of the day I think if there is a living breathing entity or collective organism that is society, situations such as me being unable to fathom how someone else is comfortable living with stolen furniture or reading a stolen book etc. is proof that I'm just a tiny cog in the wheel of this enormous entity.
That said I just realised something. I'm not nearly as uncomfortable with the idea of recieving stolen property as stealing something and keeping it myself. This isn't to say that I would either encourage this or pursue it but I can see how people do it. How they rationalise the fact that they didn't do anything wrong. That the items would have gotten stolen anyhow and all they are doing is the same thing someone else would do anyway.
Now that I think about it I knew a thief personally, an unabashed, unapolegetic thief. He supposedly never steals from friends, only large stores etc. Actually he comes from a family of thieves apparently since his father and uncle do the same thing. I'm ashamed to say I've been present when he stole things and I knew what he was doing. I never followed his path and stole but I never drew a line and said I wouldn't tolerate thise things around me. I never turned him in and I don't think I ever would have. To be honest I did on occasion enjoy the fruits of his labors.
Now that I've come full circle I am at a crossroads. I started this article blind to my own faults, self righteously proclaiming ignorance of what it is to be a thief and now by extension, by "aiding and abetting" I've established that I am a thief, what are my choices, how does this change my view of life, of who I am?
I already know what I'm going to do, since I've done it before. I've studied a little psychology so I know I'm suffering from cognitive dissonance. A rift, a dissassocitation from what I believe about myself and reality and what is now staring me in the face. I know that most of the time people, instead of doing the simple thing and accepting that they are a thief and worthy of punishment will instead change their view of the world and stealing so that once again they can be the innocent. It will always be someone else's fault.
So what will I do? Will I accept that I am a thief and take my licks? Will I make amends and ensure this never happens again. Or will it be someone else's fault, the world's fault. Adam and Eve's fault perhaps, my parents, or maybe "society."
Let me tell you what I will do. I will do exactly what you do and what we've both done and if you don't know what that is I suggest you start from the top of this article and pretend for a moment that it was the first time you read it.
I don't want it to happen, I want to change and become "better" but I know sooner or later
But then you've been here too so you know. The fact is though that the harvest of wrong that I came across in my life was sown and fertilised by people just like you and me who saw, condoned or ignored the seeds of that wrong in the past. And in the future someone will reap the harvest that we have allowed to pass.
This begets the question, or really it resurrects the scenario that Jesus brought up in the New Testament, "let he who is without sin, cast the first stone." Was Jesus saying that no one has the right to enforce anything at all? Or was he saying that death is not a proper punishment? I honestly have no clue but I do know that however dirty everyone is, someone has to make the first stand.
For example however crude as instruments the sticks and dried gut string of our distant forefather's was, by consistent effort through the ages these sticks and gut string are what created the computer chips and spacecraft that we have today. It is because of these crudest of implements that mankind has done everything we have including going to the moon.
In much the same way even the worst of criminals who takes a stand for something no matter how bad he has been in the past can make huge changes in society.
From a probability stand point it's unlikely, how many sets of sticks and fish guts can trace a lineage to the spacecraft? Not very many, most were made for a temporary purposes and then were thrown away, rotted away, or were lost before they made any permanent impact but we know there was at least one.
So it's hard, and we're all at fault but we it is possible and ever more probably the more we try.