I’ve always had an over-inflated sense of what was right and what was wrong. Sometimes that served me well; like when my sixth grade friend said we should hide in a ditch and shoot at oncoming cars with his new bee-bee gun I said, “Hellz no, my dad will literally kick my ass into next week” or something like that. And when the cops handcuffed Bruce after he shot out the driver side window of an old VW bug and put some half blind guy in the ER for stitches I knew that my sense of right and wrong had done its job.
Its sometimes not served me as well… but that’s another post.
What’s harder though, is when I see injustice and I feel powerless to stop it. Big injustices suck, but so do the small ones. For instance, my wife and I are looking to buy a new (used) car in anticipation of The Little Guy. One ad in the paper caught my eye for a 2002 Corolla with 16k miles on it. The lady selling it was nice and even said that our baby was going to be a boy and very smart. Which I thought was real nice. But, she really wanted more than we could afford and so we told her we had to think about it. I decided to do my due diligence and looked up the car’s VIN on Carfax.com.
The short and long of it was that this car didn’t have 16k miles on it because it had been in a wreck in LA with 32k miles on it. I was pissed, but what really steamed me was I knew some sucker was going to get taken by this fortune teller and I was powerless to do anything about it save picketing her hair salon. I don’t know why, but crap like this just pisses me off.
The good news is we got a car for The Little Guy. A 2002 Camry with 36K miles on it and only one owner! Sadly it was owned by this old guy whose kids decided dad wasn’t safe behind the wheel anymore, but we’ll take it still.