Thursday 31 July 2014

On Not Getting Away With Things


I wasn't cut out for a life of crime, or even close to it.  I remember my first brush with 'the law'.  I was junior high school age or younger, when one of my neighborhood friends told me one day that he had just stolen a candy bar from the market.

I didn't know that kids did that sort of thing.  But -

Wow.

…Would I ever have the courage to try such an audacious thing??...

Screwing up whatever I had of that elusive elixir, I biked down to the market, and tried to figure out how to go about doing the daring deed.  Standing just outside a checkout counter, I scanned the candy bar stock there, and figured that if I took a few of them, one at a time, and studied them, and then put all but two of them back - one to slip into my pocket and one to purchase - that would do the trick.  Probably telegraphing my intention to all but the most obtuse of store attendants - not to mention every person within sight in the whole place - I casually did the deed; and while waiting my turn to go to the open field and all the way for a touchdown, a young store attendant came up to me and asked me quietly, "Are you going to pay for the one in your pocket?," and I said yes, and did so.  And never tried that sort of thing again.

Well, not that specific sort of thing.  Not having learned my lesson fully, I tried to go down that road again in life, in high school; in my 11th grade, when I was in an office, doing something or other, and noticed a pile of papers that had just been mimeographed and were awaiting pickup by the teacher.  Being the curious sort, I looked at them more closely, and realized that they looked very much like test papers for my History class.  A  should-I-or-shouldn't-I tug of war ensued for a moment, and then I gave in to the temptation, and took a copy.  (Heck; kids did that sort of thing all the time.  And wasn't I a kid???)1  It proved indeed to be an upcoming test for my History teacher's classes.  I actually knew most of the answers anyway - History being one of my strong points, and favorite subjects in school - but in the event, missed a few of the questions on purpose, in order not to appear too suspicious.  And, as it turned out, did more poorly on the test than some of the kids in the class whom I usually did batter than on such tests.

About now you may well be figuring that I had learned my lesson in life about this sort of thing.  But some of us are hard learners.  (Indeed, I had to study hard to get the grades that I did; was not a 'natural'.)  And I finally met my Waterloo in such matters, when, in the twelfth grade (about to graduate…), in a test in my Physics class, I wasted good time by trying and trying to figure out the answer to one question in particular, and, time up, went to turn my paper in in sheer frustration; whereupon, in that state of mind, I just scribbled in an answer to it from the paper that had just been turned in ahead of mine.  Bad move.  A day or so later, when our instructor was talking to the class about the test, he mentioned how, in all of his classes, only two of his pupils got the correct answer to question number such-and-such.  He identified the two students in question, one of whom was me, and then looked at me and said, "I couldn't see from your notes how you figured it out, Duane."

"I took a wild guess," said I, thinking fast.  

That was as far as that embarrassing situation went.2  But it stayed with me, through graduation; and I figured - finally got - that, for whatever reason, I just wasn't cut out for that sort of thing.  And didn't like it, anyway.  Preferred the 'system' that I encountered in university, when, in attending Stanford (up north in the San Francisco Bay area; known as 'the Harvard of the West'), I discovered that they had what they called the Honor System, whereby you could take your exams back to your rooms if you wished to, were just bound by the school's code not to cheat.  Hey - that was cool, I thought.  I could relate to that.  They're treating us like adults, I thought.  And never failed to honor the code.

Ah.  Adults.  And now I come to it; the salient point of this essay.  

I am disgusted by two things regarding Barry Soetoro/Barack Obama's election to and ineligibility for the presidential office.  No. 1: that he (and his handlers) tried it.  And no. 2: that he  got away with it.  Is, getting away with it.  Because of a citizenry that has failed to do its civic duty, and uphold the rule of law in the country: the Constitution.  Thus opening the country to the rule of men.  And takeover, by despots.

Disgusted; not because I am clean as a whistle in that sort of regard.  But because I've seen what not living by Truth can lead to:

the modern world.  In dire jeopardy.  As we speak of such things.3   

---
footnotes:

1 , trying to prove that status to myself.  Even though not feeling it very much.  Another story.


2 I often wondered, afterwards, if any of the kids in the class figured out what the deal was.  I didn't sit anywhere's near the other smart student in the class; what was our teacher alluding to???  
     Oh well - time to move on.  Class dismissed.


3  For example:

"You’re not going to believe what just happened to a friend of mine…
"We all know that Obama and Big Government have been up to some seriously shady stuff (IRS scandal, NSA cover-up, etc), but this one really takes the cake…
"My buddy Frank Bates has been working on putting together some pretty incredible survival food packages at prices that any patriot can afford, and I guess FEMA must have got wind of what he was doing, because FEMA just contacted his supplier and attempted to buy up his ENTIRE stockpile.
"FEMA’s been caught red-handed hoarding survival food!"…

No comments: