Another Friday, Another Holiday Weekend

I saw someone shoplift tonight.

I was at Brooklyn Industries (50% Off All Women's Sweaters & Outerwear!) and I saw this whole scene play out. I didn't realize what was going on at the time, but what I figured out was, this woman and her kid walk in to the store and start looking at stuff close to the door. They keep setting the alarm off "accidentally" -- which is blamed on the kid -- so that the clerks no longer even look up when it buzzes. Meanwhile a guy -- later revealed to be the friend, maybe husband and father, of the woman and her kid -- stuffs a sweater in his bag and walks out. I see him when he does and when the alarm goes off, it's definitely him who sets it. As planned, the clerks take no notice, and he's out. Another guy in the store comes up to me and asks if I saw the sweater he laid down by my things.

A few minutes later I run into the woman, the kid and the guy walking together down Seventh Avenue.

I've seen one other shoplifting in action. My friend and I were in a mall in Baltimore shopping at the Gap. (Also having a good sale) We walk around a rack of jeans and see this kid crouching on the floor, frantically shoving jeans into his backpack. When he sees us he freezes. (My friend Sam is a large, intimidating ex-con who has seen the light and gone straight.) Sam says, his hands held in the air in a no-worries gesture, "It's not my business." And we keep walking.

Seconds later we see the backpack kid make a mad sprint through the door with the alarms blaring and the oh so preppy Assistant Manager on Duty feigning an attempt to run after him.

This kind of stuff amazes me. Maybe I should be the kind of person who intervenes when she sees wrong doing, but I really don't have a problem with it. First of all, a few pairs of jeans are not going to hurt the Gap. And the kid who was stealing them maybe had a good reason. Maybe he was taking them home to his family who couldn't afford to buy them. Maybe he wanted his brother to have a nice present for once on his birthday. Maybe he was going to sell them for crack. Who knows.

And that little crooked family who is exploiting their toddler ... how does that happen? What life circumstances could lead to someone thinking that's okay behavior? Now I know that there are truly bad people. And Smoking Baby knows I believe in sociopaths, but I also believe that for the majority of people, they're led to bad behavior by shitty circumstances.

Tonight I was talking to Dan and he told me about a murder that happened in his apartment building Christmas night. After much drama and Law and Order police-line-do-not-cross action, he found out that what happened was a drunken fight between two young guys that had moved out to the sidewalk. One of them pushed the other and when the guy fell, he hit the concrete in such a way that he died. The fight lasted for about 3 minutes and now one person is dead and one person's life is now most likely going to be spent in prison for murder. Imagine that. Being a white trash girl from South Georgia, I have been in several drunken fights in my life. (Ok. One was in New York, but it was someone else's fault.) And I've pushed people down. (In New York, I slammed someone down on a Pac-Man table game, but that's a story for a later post.) And I can not fathom how I would even begin to handle the repercussions if I had shoved someone down just right (or wrong, I suppose) and taken their life in a stupid late night drunken fight over something certainly ridiculous. Like the rules to Quarters.

Happy New Year!