You raise good points, and indeed it is a fine line.

But being a bizzybody and a turncoat, ie, fukn w/ somebody's job, are two
different things.

There are indeed some dicey issues. For example, when you suspect child
abuse in your neighbor, but w/ no concrete evidence--just WHAT do you do????
*Either* course of action can prove disastrous.

Well, I'll tell you what the Harold's do and DON'T do:

Whilst turning in their neighbors for the slightest offense of a municipal
ordinance, if a woman were being raped and stabbed outside his apt. door,
he'd turn a deaf ear.
Proly she's a whore, proly she ax'd for it, proly she's not that good
looking anyway, so Harold need not get involved.

Harold has everything figgered out--for Harold.

Harold is a coward and a li'l bitch, and will spend the rest of his
mostly-useless life rationalizing and concealing that fact, mostly by making
other people's lives miserable.
----------------------------
Mr. P.V.'d
formerly Droll Troll

"John Husvar" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Jon Danniken" wrote:



You're reading far too much into that post, Harold.

I'm going to put this as simply as I can; I fully agree that theft is
wrong,
but I don't snicker at the guy buying condoms, stare uncomfortably at the
young girl buying tampons, or count the number of pipe fittings of the
fellow in front of me. I also don't fantasize about the sexual relations
between clerks and customers.

It's called respecting people's space, Harold and since I don't like
people
sticking their nose into my business, I try to avoid hypocricy by not
sticking my nose into theirs. I fully admit that with this outlook I
would
not have noticed the possible theft of merchandise that you witnessed at
the
Home Depot, because I believe in giving other people their space.

If that makes me such a bad person in your eyes, then you must be a far
better man than I to be able to judge me so.

Jon

Reading your post, I think I understand what you're getting at.

Respecting others' privacy and not sticking your nose into their
business is not the same as ignoring an offense in progress. You just
might not notice it because you're not looking for it.

It's not necessary to go about as some self-appointed Eye-of-the-Law and
Guardian of the Public Good and I don't think Harold or any of the rest
of us in this thread is advocating that.

Just for myself, it's an issue of what I should do if I casually become
aware of some dishonesty. Notifying a merchant of an occurrence, to me,
is simply being a good customer and a cautious consumer. One might just
be informing him of a security hole he's missed. Shoplifting and
pilferage raise prices and I hate rising prices!

IIRC, the cashier in the original incident was a trainee. It is to the
manager's benefit for cashiers to become aware of common scams and learn
to be alert to them.

I'm certainly not some paragon of virtue. Let's get that straight at the
start. I have the same temptations as anyone else and at one time or
another I've broken or badly bent most of the Big Ten Crash Landings,
in, as the Roman Catholic tradition says, thought, word, or deed.

I've also endured the consequences of being labeled a snitch when I did
no such thing, wasn't involved at all in the incident in question, and
in fact didn't even know of it.

I dislike busybodies as much as the next guy, but I also have some sense
of civic duty to help my fellow citizens and to help the society be as
honest as a society of human beings can be, in whatever small way I can.

One needn't go around looking for incidents of dishonesty to become
aware of one happening. That's the decision point that, to me, speaks
directly to character. People will make different decisions on how to
handle such incidents. I would hope most would elect to do whatever they
can to foil bad behavior or to at least make the appropriate person(s)
aware of it.

One needn't personally accost a shoplifter or pilferer, but one needn't
help them with silence either.

Ah, well, another windmill resists my lance. Onward, Sancho!