To trust or not to trust?
Contributing writer
All my life I have operated under the assumption that 95 per cent of people are honest and well-meaning, and I do not have energy to spare worrying about the other five per cent. I seldom lock my car. I leave clothes unattended in laundromats. I seldom count the change returned to me by sales clerks.
A couple of recent incidents have caused me to question that philosophy. First, I put two loads of laundry in the drier at the local laundromat and went to a basketball game. After the game, I came to retrieve them and found one load missing. For years a few of my friends have been telling me I should always stay with my clothes, but I did not listen. Now they can all say, "I told you so."
The theft was a complete surprise to me. If I had thought about it at all, I would have assumed my possessions were safe there for several reasons. First, Hillsboro is on the whole an honest, respectable community. Second, my clothing is hardly good enough to provide much temptation. (I am more likely to buy them at Wal-Mart than Dillard's.) Finally, I doubt that anybody else is large enough to wear them. There must be something wrong with my reasoning somewhere.
Then a man bought $260 worth of stuff at my auction and drove off without paying for it. It developed that he had probably shown a false ID to get his bidding number. This was particularly worrisome, because one of the items he bought was a gun. If someone fakes ID to buy a gun, I have to wonder what he plans to use it for.
In this second situation I feel there were some elementary precautions the auctioneer and I should have taken. Neither of us thought of recording the serial numbers on the guns. That might not have prevented the theft, but at least the gun might have been traced if he offered it to a dealer or pawn shop. In the future the auctioneer plans to keep guns at the clerk's office until paid for. Of course, that would not necessarily keep the buyer from writing a check which was a forgery or not backed by sufficient funds. Neither of us have turned paranoid, but we did learn to be more cautious and a little less trusting.
Perhaps that was a valuable lesson, but I'm not so sure. When we try to protect ourselves by keeping our guard up and fencing other people out, might we miss more than we gain? Can we develop warm and caring bonds with the people around us when we are expecting them to cheat us or trample on us in some other way?
As for the incident in the laudromat, my first thought was, "I guess the friends who have told me it is foolish to leave clothes unattended are right, and I was wrong." On further consideration, however, I began to question that conclusion.
I have been leaving clothes in the washer or drier while I do other errands for roughly 40 years. I have finally lost one drier full of clothes. I posed a question to myself: given a choice would I prefer to lose one drier of clothes in 40 years or live my life expecting everyone to try to rip me off? With those alternatives I think those few clothes were a small price to pay.
One mission in life is to spread the love of God among all the people who cross our path. Can we do that while viewing each person we meet with suspicion and distrust?
Perhaps I will be a little more cautious in the future. I guess it couldn't hurt to lock my car, especially if I leave something valuable in it. My cars, like my clothes, do not represent a very attractive temptation, but I have acquired one a little better than I usually drive. I probably won't have any more guns to sell, but hindsight tells me some precautions there might have prevented a possible tragedy (though I hope my imagination there is over-dramatic). I suppose that on the rare occasions when I do my wash in the laundromat, I could take a book and stay there. But I may not.
On the whole, people who choose to trust other people may get ripped off more often, but I think they are usually happier than those who assume the whole world is out to get them.
