It's Weird Out There

Photo by Jakob Rosen on Unsplash

It's not about arresting "the worst" criminals, or even about criminals at all. They can just grab you if they don't like your looks, or if they need a couple more victims to meet their quota.

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Imagine that your cousin is hoarding spoons. Her kitchen drawers are full of spoons. She has crates of spoons stacked in the garage. When you comment that she has more spoons than she can possibly use, she says, "I might need them someday." Then you find out that her neighbor also hoards spoons, in some kind of competition to see who can own the most spoons in the county. Between the two of them, they have actually created a local spoon shortage, making it difficult for folks to obtain spoons for their families. They know this, but they keep obsessively hoarding more and more spoons, setting world records for spoon accumulation, while other people are reduced to using sticks to eat their pudding.

Why do we think it's crazy when it's spoons, but not when it's dollars?

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Once upon a time, crooked politicians had the dignity to do their corruption and bribe-taking in secret.

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Imagine a department manager in the company where you work, who often admits he doesn't remember orders that he issued, has never heard of company policies, doesn't know what people in his department are doing, admits to making important decisions based on the vague opinions of "many people", can't explain the reason for directions he gave to employees, often seems unable to remember events he was involved in just a few days or a few hours ago. That guy would be fired.

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People who are unimaginative and without skills, unable to create anything interesting or valuable, make themselves powerful the only way they can, through destruction.

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Hoarding

My Mom, as a young married woman, noticed when visiting her Mother - my Grandma - that Grandma kept junk mail. Mom complained to Grandma, who denied that it was junk. When Grandma wasn't looking, Mom threw the junk mail away. But Grandma found it in the trash and retrieved it. So Mom sneakily took the junk mail and threw it away at her own house.

Forty years later, I realized that Mom was a hoarder. She kept old papers and useless junk that piled up all over her house and made it look like a garbage dump. I couldn't get her to part with anything. I complained, and she said she wasn't so bad compared to her own Mother, and then told me the story about the junk mail.

"But you save junk mail!" I protested. "No I don't," she claimed. I turned to a box on the floor and reached inside, exposing a handful of Grandma's ancient junk mail, carefully preserved along with dead relatives' bank statements from closed accounts at banks that no longer existed, postcards from the vacations of long-forgotten people with indecipherable handwriting, clothing still in the original packages, and the occasional spoon.

What Mom didn't know was that I had already developed the habit of taking her hoarded trash home wth me to throw out.