The thinking behind the thought
Monday, April 21st, 2008As I explained to Ann in the comment to my last post, I intended yesterday’s “thought of the day” as essentially a positive observation. That might seem strange. Heck, it is strange. It might be a bit more accurate to say it was half of a positive observation.
Yesterday I spent some time at my best friend Joseph’s while he was doing home improvement things on his house. He told me the story of a former associate of his who was thoroughly unscrupulous and untrustworthy. Not only did he lack compassion for the misfortune of others, he actively mocked those who showed such compassion. Once when Joe stuffed $20 in the tip jar of a broken-down looking old guy who played piano in a bar in which they drank, this associate said, “Why’d you give money to that old loser? People like that should just die and get out of the way.”
Now I think people get to say things like that if they want to. Unlike liberals and conservatives, to pick two examples utterly out of air, I don’t believe people should be beat up, locked up, or killed, for saying things I don’t like or disagree with. I realize that there are plenty of conservatives and liberals who believe that I should be beat up, locked up, and killed for saying any such thing myself. Some have said so. (Beliefs such as mine were once demonized as “abusive tolerance,” a phrase which thankfully I’ve not read in a long time.)
That said, people behaving like assholes don’t endear themselves to me. When I catch myself doing it, I don’t much like me. And the associate I’m talking about did defraud people by inducing them to provide him services on the basis of promises he never intended to keep. That to me actually is a crime. But since he was a lawyer, he also did it in ways that were hard to prove.
So a few years later, as you’ve probably guessed, or offender hit the skids himself. And felt terribly aggrieved and hard done by when, basically, the sharks raced in to grab their mouthfuls of his flesh, and his own former associates - including the people he’d screwed - refused to help him.