Fate or Coincidence? Exposing bizarre codes of Conduct
Anna Libet
Yesterday evening, while
riding a local bus home from work, I was approached by a young woman looking
to find change for a ten-dollar bill. As I only had 3 ones and a twenty
I couldn’t provide her with change. The young woman (who appeared to be
a teenager) then went up to the driver to see if she could break the ten.
She didn’t have any change either, so the woman returned to the back of
the bus and resumed a conversation with her friend.
About five blocks later,
the bus pulls over to a stop where another young woman is standing. She
also looks of teen age. She informs the driver that she left her purse
on the bus and asks if she can come in to look for it. The driver lets
her on, and the woman walks directly to the back, where the two friends
are sitting. She promptly retrieves her purse and leaves the bus. As she
begins to inspect it, the driver asks her if there was any money in it.
The woman says, “Yeah, I had ten dollars.” The driver then calls to the
girls in the back: “ Did you guys find ten dollars back there?” “Yeah.”
So, the woman gets back
on the bus and collects her ten dollars. During the exchange she mentions
that she also had a few ones in the purse but the woman who tried to get
change for her ten-dollar bill minutes earlier says that the one-dollar
bills she has are her own. Before it occurs to me to turn around
and witness this bizarre interaction, the woman again leaves the bus quickly,
and judging by her demeanor, apparently without any sign of anger or annoyance
that her ten dollar bill had not been found where she had left it - in
her purse. Nor do the friends betray any hint of shame or embarrassment
about taking the money. Although, perhaps the driver’s non-accusatory
approach got the woman’s ten dollars back, she never directly acknowledged
that the ten dollars was most likely lifted, or that the purse it-self
was not brought to her attention.
The third time the woman
steps back on the bus she hesitates and discovers that her green card
is also missing. The driver again asks the friends if they found a green
card, and one of the friends replies: “No, there wasn’t any green card…”
Obviously, it would have
been necessary to go through the purse to find money, without finding
identification. Any patron on the bus paying attention would have realized
what had happened and that this couldn’t be a coincidence. After all,
according to logical inference, the ten-dollar bill probably wasn’t hanging
temptingly out of the purse waiting to be taken. But no one offered
any words or looks of reproach for this apparent theft, myself included.
By all accounts, it appeared accepted that the money had been taken (stolen)
and it was simply a matter of returning it upon request.
I began to wonder if it
was coincidence or fate or some mystical karma that had allowed these
two parties to come together, thus exposing the strange series of events
I had just witnessed. Whatever it was, it enabled the likely perpetrator
of petty theft to be united momentarily with the property’s owner, but
was there any sign of awkwardness? Did anyone care? Resoundingly no. They
acted more like acquaintances trying to resolve a routine misunderstanding:
like who should have picked up the tab when they were done eating.
Allegorically speaking,
one lesson was easy enough to point out: perhaps people should occasionally
conduct ourselves as if they know someone is watching because eventually
someone will be. Moreover, that eventuality might not be an inconsequential
encounter with strangers; in fact, it could be of great significance to
one’s life or to an impressionable child perhaps.
But beyond lessons of morality,
the incident left a disturbing rhetorical question in my mind: Has
substandard ethical conduct become so commonplace that it’s beyond reproach?
If we spin this question out to its fruition, do we not rediscover the
bigger picture wherein corporate greed and malfeasance seemingly go un-noticed
for years? Or where police brutality is swept under the rug time and time
again because corrupt cops can rely on enforced privacy? Or where
politicians don’t even keep up a pretense of sounding legitimately honest?
Perhaps if respect were
magically enforced regularly by coincidence or divine intervention, we
wouldn’t have to rely on expensive lawyers to publicly right our private
wrongs. But in the meantime, we should also affect our own intervention
by suggesting to some to use their vanity mirrors not to check how they
appear, but to inspect who they really are.
Republished 6.26.06
