Whereupon an author takes umbrage with one of my posts

Francis Porretto did not like my shopping cart post.  Luckily, he saves his anger for the person who wrote the original, not for me.

The miscreant who wrote the text of the image above isn’t just opinionated. He clearly feels justified to judge others according to his personal standards – and by “to judge” I mean to indict, try, convict, sentence, and execute. He wouldn’t be safe around me. I might let him pop off once without penalty. On the second incidence – which in the case of such persons usually occurs about five seconds after you’ve let the first one pass – I’d haul him up by the scruff of his neck. (Politely, of course; I never kill or cripple on first acquaintance. Well, hardly ever.)

One of the phrases I remember from when I was a wee bairn was my mother telling me that if you want to know what someone is like, observe them when they're driving or playing sports.  That's when they let the mask slip.  That's when you see who they are underneath any facade they might put up in other circumstances.

As I've grown older, I've found other indicators as well, but the sports and driving still hold true.

I'll be the first to admit that when I read that graphic about the shopping cart, it struck a personal bias with me.  When I was stuck in the City of Lost Angels, I was shocked at the number of shopping carts strewn about the public streets.  Not just one or two.  Dozens.  I was mentoring a couple of kids from my church at the time, and we made a game to see how many shopping carts we could see laying on the sidewalks while I drove from one place to another.  At one point, just driving around my block, I counted fourteen shopping carts.

Mr. Porretto points out that in some grocery stores, there are people whos job it is to retrieve the carts from the lot.  Therefore, by leaving the carts where they are, you are allowing someone to earn a paycheck.  This is true.

Were you aware that most supermarkets employ people to fetch the shopping carts from where they’ve been abandoned around the asphalt prairies? Were you aware that shoppers who personally return shopping carts inflict more damage, both to the carts and to shoppers’ cars, than those paid hirelings?

I can also attest to the fact that there are trucks that drive around Los Angeles picking up all those shopping carts that festoon the sidewalks like odd plants.  They would come by my neighborhood about once a week.  I would normally put the shopping carts on the boulevard just to get them off the sidewalk.  The truck would come by, load the carts into their stack, and drive on.

Guess who paid for that service?  Yes, of course the stores paid, but do you think the cost stopped there?  And after buying groceries in the LA area for three and a half years, I can say that our food budget dropped by half when we left.  There's a reason for that.  Having to retrieve shopping carts that are scattered about the city is part of it.  The massive amount of shoplifting is another.  People who will steal a shopping cart probably have no bias against stealing other things.

Let me talk about another part of LA for just a bit.  I may have already posted it years back, but I can't find it in the archives and my searching ability seems to have suffered.  So you get the short-short version.  My boss, a damn fine guy, was out for a jog.  Waiting at a crosswalk.  He gets the right-of-way and starts to jog across the intersection when a guy paying attention to either his phone or his radio makes the corner at about 35 MPH.  Luckily, my boss sees it coming and hops up, thereby ensuring that he only bounces off the hood rather than being run over.  Still does a lot of damage.  He didn't know it until later, but getting hit that hard had ruptured five disks in his back.  The car didn't stop.  Nobody stopped.  Nobody bothered to see if he was OK.  He was laying in the crosswalk, in excruciating pain, and the people in the cars around him starting honking at him.  He was in the way, you see.

The man had just been the victim of a hit-and-run accident, and nobody could even bother to call 911 for him.  They honked at him because he was just an irritation to them.

I submit to you that having to police up shopping carts around my house, and my boss getting honked at while he couldn't even stand up, are related.

The same kind of self-absorbed individual who takes the shopping cart home and dumps it on the sidewalk in front of someone else's house is the same kind of self-absorbed individual who won't call 911 for someone who just got hit by a car.  In both cases, they are only thinking of themselves.  To that self-absorbed individual, the other person is either an irritation to be avoided or a mark to be used.  One of the greatest culture shocks when we moved to LA is how people treated an invitation to dinner.  Their response was, in a multitude of ways, "What do you want from me?"  The vast majority of dinner invitations we received in the first year were an excuse for the person issuing the invitation to pitch us on some business scheme.  The concept of just having dinner and being friendly was rather foreign to them.

So, do I want to live in a world where people who don't return shopping carts are flogged?  No.  But I've lived in a place where people dump shopping carts on your front lawn as a matter of habit, and you couldn't pay me enough to go back.  Because the people who do such things are the kind of people who only care about themselves in the long run.

I am also perfectly willing to admit that having lived in a place where I had to pick up shopping carts from my yard and set them on the boulevard has given me quite a bit of personal bias regarding putting the shopping cart back.  But I didn't just live with random carts appearing in my yard as if placed there by aliens.  They were put there by my neighbors, who apparently thought so little of the people around them that they felt perfectly fine dumping shopping carts and other trash on the property I tried to keep clean.  My morning rituals prior to my run consisted of picking up trash, putting shopping carts in the boulevard and removing/covering up the graffiti that would appear on our wall.

One of the things that the Army tries to hammer into its Soldiers is the fact that Integrity is doing the right thing when nobody is watching.  In Lost Angeles, I would have been happy with people just leaving the shopping carts in the store parking lot.  That didn't happen.  Civilization runs on people who do the right thing when no one is watching.  When people begin to just ignore that, you get Lost Angeles.

Please go read Mr. Porretto's post, because he makes valid points, and as a Christian I have an obligation to forgive the people who harm me.  My question, then, is at what point is the harm less against me, and more against the civilization that I try to uphold?  Because a person who will not put a shopping cart back, and instead drags it and dumps it in to my yard, is a person who will sin against me in larger ways if they have the opportunity.