By Tom Dodge, KERA Commentator
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-701497.mp3
Dallas, TX –
Here in Midlothian during the past seven years giant houses sprouted up like crabgrass and now it's all come to a halt. A developer I know buys farmland and brings in groundgobblers that chew up the grass and trees and spit it all out and then gouge out strips for streets to pave and puts Big Hair houses and driveways there for suburbanites to park their big old gas-thirsty behemoths. He told me the other day that he has sold only 34 out of 150 lots on a parcel of land near my house. "Good," I said. "I'd say we're saturated with Big McCastles and rolling pollution machines." This wasn't polite but what I was thinking was worse.
Also a local Wal-Mart employee told me that shoplifters are hitting them with the old five-fingered discount at an even higher rate than the usual $3 billion yearly. Some even bring the lifted loot back for a refund to buy gas with. And more Americans are driving out of gas stations without paying. Men sneak in after hours and fill up their semis and their enormous containers, just suck it right out of the underground tanks, thousands of dollars worth. Do we have enough jails to hold the hordes of people who will be doing this when gas prices rise to five dollars a gallon? Will they be hijacking Exxon trucks? Will a new industry of prison-construction rise along with gas prices?
And there's a new wrinkle now on cosmetic scams.
Women are going in Botoxeries and getting thousands of dollars worth of treatments and then skating out without paying. One ran up a big bill and when the time came to pay she said she had to go to her car to get her money and never came back. She paid instead with jail time and restitution. How clever will women get in order to abscond when Botoxers start asking for payment upfront? Will polyester faces count for very much in Leavenworth? What would Jesus do?
This current economic nosedive has generated a lot of media coverage but nobody every asks questions of the Wall Street wizards that I would ask. I would like to hear some interviewer ask, "Do we here in America have so much hubris that we believe the laws of economic gravity don't apply to us, that everything that goes up in America doesn't have to come down, because we're faith-based?" What does faith-based really mean?
Just how religious are we anyway? I read figures from The National Association For Shoplifting Prevention on line that show Americans steal $13 billion worth of goods from retail stores each year. And since polls also indicate that around 88 percent of Americans believe in God, does this mean that religion and morality go their separate ways during hard times? Or is all of this thievery being done by the 12 percent who say they're atheists? I'm curious about this.
If atheists are doing all this larceny, they're not being caught. Only two-tenths of a percent of all prisoners are atheists. So, what's the deal? Are Godless shoppers actually more honest than the faith-based? If a rerun of the 1930s depression hits, what then? Is moral behavior dependent on full and unlimited acquisition of consumer products and cheap gas?
Tom Dodge is a writer from Midlothian.
If you have opinions or rebuttals about this commentary, call (214) 740-9338 or email us