Thought for the day: “All it takes for evil to conquer is for good men to do nothing”

So it was my birthday the other month, and I think I’m getting old.

I went down to the local Chinese takeaway for some fish & chips. While I was waiting, there were three or four unaccompanied young kids bratting around the place. While the proprietors were busy cooking, the kids occupied themselves pilfering chicken wings from the smorgasboard selection. These kids were between 9 and 12 I’d say, and were quite happy to egg each other on to swipe the morsels.
So there’s me in the tail end of my twenties, trying to decide whether to chalk it up to youthful high spirits, or to shop them in to the owners for shoplifting, or give them a clip around the ears myself. In the end, I thought about it so long, that my order came and I left.

It probably says something about me that my mind has run back over this event quite a bit and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that, in my own indecisive way, I’ve just done my bit towards the decline of New Zealand society. That sounds a bit melodramatic, but really, if these kids’ parents haven’t brought them up to know better, then they need some boundaries imposed on their behaviour to let them know that society frowns on it. Probably these kids aren’t going to grow up to be armed robbers or anything like that, but I can’t help but feel that I’ve implicitly given them the message that what they did was OK.

So my birthday present to myself was the realization that I think too much. And after all that, I’m still not sure what I’d do if it happened again.

I wrote this piece about a year ago, it must have been, since I'm no longer in the tail end of my twenties, but the head end of my thirties.