Another Blast From The Past, 2007 May, I Believe

"I know sage, wormwood, and hyssop, but I can't smell character unless it stinks."  Edward Dahlberg

A long day at work finally wound down, and the thought of lemonade brought us to the local supermarket. I sat in the truck, two disappointed little dogs standing in my lap, watching through the window as my wife disappeared past the automatic doors. The radio murmured quietly as a gentle breeze filtered into the cab, and I watched a slice of the local population filter into and out of the store. People watching. My favorite pastime.

One of those imported sport/luxury sedans was parked two slots over. Nice chrome custom wheels graced four corners. Low profile performance tires were wrapped around those rims. He paid extra for those. The front tires were worn nearly to the chord. The rears looked almost new. Somebody appeared to have been smokin' those tires around the neighborhood more than absolutely necessary. And he had not mastered the art of rotating them. I put a mental check in the bad column over that one.

When the driver returned to this car, and unloaded his shopping cart through his passenger door, I watched. I won the bet with myself when he left the cart sitting in the adjacent parking slot, rather than returning it to the store or pushing it into one of those cart parking areas that the store provides. And no, I was not surprised when, after he had consumed the contents of those take-out food containers, they just slipped out his window to splat on the pavement. Two more checks in the bad column.

OK, so the guy is a slob. That is not exactly equivalent to mass murder, but I do believe his acts add up to what you might call bad character. And if you add up enough bad character, pretty soon you end up with a society like ours, which often seems sorely lacking in the good version.

Swinging your fists around in the air is not bad character. Swinging them into some innocent person's jaw in a crowded room is. Bad character has a signature. Trying to park your car in that slot in the parking lot in which the shopping cart sits reminds you of bad character. Finding the litter next to it confirms the suspicion. Watching the hillside go up in flames because someone thinks that smoking cigarettes is a license to litter, well that smells of bad character, too.

Lying, cheating, and stealing demonstrate bad character. Those merchants in China slipped melamine into the wheat and rice gluten that recently showed up in your pets' food. They just wanted their protein to assay higher, so they could sell it at a better price, and they didn't care a wit if somebody died. Bad character.

"As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly."  Samuel Johnson.

Perhaps this is where we end up. Spend enough time in a world rife with bad character, and our standards drop. A certain quiet resignation settles down upon our shoulders as we face the hopelessness of it all.

And then there is that mirror on the wall, where our own examples of bad character come home to roost. We live in glass houses. Perhaps we shouldn't be too quick with that stone. And we are not without sin, so we shouldn't cast the first one. So what should we do when we realize, as the radio guy pointed out the other day, "The world changes, but human nature does not."

Perhaps we could listen to Marcus Aurelius, from the 2^nd century:

"Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one."