Lines and Standards 🕵🙉🧙‍♂️

I guess we all have our own slightly different lines and standards.

Not being physically violent is the big one. The golden standard. That's the one that you have to follow or you automatically suck.

(And if your intellectual ideas ever involve initiating violence, then you're confused, at least on that topic.)

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Actually there's gonna be a detour:

Being nice and completely respectful to children is kind of the biggest thing.

The precious little things are like sponges, forming their attitude and footprint around every experience.

It just isn't really a "line" that you can technically identify. Where "nice" ends and "mean" begins is hard to neatly define.

And of course mileage varies. If you blowup a building, that's worse than being a little curt to a child when you've had a tough day. (You should apologize and try to do better, but of course it's trivial by comparison.)

So it's sort of just its own thing. It's like everything on the spectrum that would also be bad to do to adults gets intensely magnified and worse when you do it to children.

But in general, people who are mean to kids are the lowest of lows to me.

If you slap an adult, that's kind of shitty, but they probably just get over it. And at least you have the law against you and face other repercussions.

If you're emotionally aggressive to a child (if you're mean, threatening, unfair), you're legally in the clear and, tragically, often face little or no social stigma from it.

But what you've done is awful, and violates the bond of you and a dependent human being, and harms them and the attitudes they'll form.

So they're showing you what's in their heart. They're telling you how they'd behave when they think nobody is looking.

And it's reasonable to figure that they're only peaceful to you because they know they have to be and there would be some immediate cost to them if they weren't.

Christian doctrines are usually pretty solid imo. But "honor thy parents" should really be changed to "don't ever be mean to a child". Parents can deal. Children are precious.

{If you're reading this and you've been mean to kids before 😱, it's not too late to change. So don't fret too much. If there's a God in Heaven, She'll judge you largely by the Path That You're On and how you handle things and Go Forward. Something like Super Mario Kart or a rigged NFL Football Game; you always wanna do good, but what happens early on usually just comes out in the wash.}

{So just stop and try to be better.}

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And then you go further and further down the layers of the onion. The lady who improperly claimed to be in line at the grocery store, etc.

You get to the increasingly trivial stuff. But usually there's still a clear right and wrong code of conduct.

I'll go full throttle when I know something is fine.

In fantasy baseball, I won't stream starting pitchers a little bit but then feel bashful before going too far-- If the rules allow for it, I'll add/drop as many as I want every day.

If a casino willfully operates with a bet or angle that you determine to be profitable, I suggest that you hit it hard until they change their policy.

Other people will sometimes have weird stances about these things. They see an issue or a "scam" or an injustice where actually there isn't one.

(I tend to believe this is because they don't hold hard enough to the aforementioned things that actually matter, so they're overly on the lookout for ways to feel righteous and just, and take to imaginary and nonsensible things to fill the void.)

Today I saw something interesting at the convenience store.

Guy buys 2 bottles of 5-Hour Energy. Pays. Says he'd like a scratch ticket. When the store attendant is getting the ticket, he swipes change out of the "take-a-penny-leave-a-penny" thing.

Fascinating.

(I don't know what exactly he took. I just saw the swipe. Some pennies remained. So my best guess is there was something higher than a penny, and he took it.)

I'd love to be able to pick his brain about it. Does he do this regularly? How exactly does he feel about it? What denomination of change did he take? Is there a cutoff, like he only swipes nickels and above? Was there any reason that he paid for the items separately?

I bet a lot of the people who buy scratch tickets are addicts. So perhaps, to him, it's not "20 cents" per se-- it's a little step towards his next dose.

For me, this is a line I don't cross.

And it has nothing to do with the amount. I always pick up change on the sidewalk, and I stand there and request my change when I buy a $0.99 Arizona Iced Tea and they try to not give me the penny.

One way to look at it is I would never swipe from the take-a-penny just once in a while. If I feel it's valid, I would empty the tray every time. And that seems pretty obviously not any kind of way to live.

So it has to be invalid.

I do, however, take from the automatic change dispensers when the customer in front of me leaves theirs.

(If you're tempted to say "but that's the same thing, how could you do one but not the other??"-- Nope. Disagree. There's a commonality of spare change and a tray, but that doesn't mean the mechanics of each situation are the same.)

It's just practical, for one. If my change slides out and it's all mixed now, I'm not gonna sift thru it and figure out what I'm really entitled to. That alone kind of proves the etiquette that the next person should take it.

But even if I'm receiving $0.00 change, or if it's an obvious amount that I could easily pick out of the pile, I'll still swipe the pile. (I don't think my entitlement to the pile should hinge on what my amount of change happens to be. Tho you could make a really fair argument that you have to be a cash payer to take it.)

If they come back in a huff and I hear them talking about the 57 cents they're owed, I give it to them.