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penfield"Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest."
- Mark Twain
On my way to work this morning, I passed through the Pentagon Row plaza and saw a plastic water bottle sitting next to a large shrubbery planter. My guess is that some citizen, perhaps resting after a workout or simply enjoying their own homestyle beverage, was socializing in that spot yesterday and inadvertently left it there.
First, I wondered if it was worth stealing for myself. I decided it was not.
Then, I wondered if the owner would come back to this spot to try and reclaim it. It seemed unlikely that the item would last that long before being tidied away by a passerby less discriminating than myself.
And finally I wondered if there was some kind of lost-and-found for the area. While the Pentagon Row Plaza is a minor hub of social activity for all ages, it is merely a loose federation of shops and restaurants without any central governance. Even if there were a lost-and-found, its location would not be immediately obvious to the average loser.
Intuitively, the whole concept of a Lost-and-Found seems like proof of a "good" society, not just because it facilitates the reunion of individuals and their rightful property, but also because it relies on the conscientious nature of the "finder" to turn the item in rather than keep it for themselves.
But I see the flipside: in a truly good-natured society, the average person could be counted on to refrain from picking the item up and keeping it for themselves, and the owner of the lost item could simply return to the place they left it and it would still be there waiting to be reclaimed. In the real world, "finders-keepers, losers-weepers" is the law of the land, and the Lost-and-Found is an convention artificially imposed on us to maintain order. So the Lost-and-Found is actually evidence of (and a resistor for) humanity's opportunistic, avaricious, scavenging impulses.
Have a great day, everybody!
- Mark Twain
On my way to work this morning, I passed through the Pentagon Row plaza and saw a plastic water bottle sitting next to a large shrubbery planter. My guess is that some citizen, perhaps resting after a workout or simply enjoying their own homestyle beverage, was socializing in that spot yesterday and inadvertently left it there.
First, I wondered if it was worth stealing for myself. I decided it was not.
Then, I wondered if the owner would come back to this spot to try and reclaim it. It seemed unlikely that the item would last that long before being tidied away by a passerby less discriminating than myself.
And finally I wondered if there was some kind of lost-and-found for the area. While the Pentagon Row Plaza is a minor hub of social activity for all ages, it is merely a loose federation of shops and restaurants without any central governance. Even if there were a lost-and-found, its location would not be immediately obvious to the average loser.
Intuitively, the whole concept of a Lost-and-Found seems like proof of a "good" society, not just because it facilitates the reunion of individuals and their rightful property, but also because it relies on the conscientious nature of the "finder" to turn the item in rather than keep it for themselves.
But I see the flipside: in a truly good-natured society, the average person could be counted on to refrain from picking the item up and keeping it for themselves, and the owner of the lost item could simply return to the place they left it and it would still be there waiting to be reclaimed. In the real world, "finders-keepers, losers-weepers" is the law of the land, and the Lost-and-Found is an convention artificially imposed on us to maintain order. So the Lost-and-Found is actually evidence of (and a resistor for) humanity's opportunistic, avaricious, scavenging impulses.
Have a great day, everybody!
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A Testimonial
Date: 2008-05-01 01:51 am (UTC)25 years
and all that time
I have dropped things.
I've dropped
tissues,
letters from women
in Santa Fe, N.M.,
money,
the keys to my house,
books by
Jacques Prevert.
And all this time,
you,
the people of this
city, have pointed
to me, and said,
"Hey!" "Sir!" "You!
You dropped something!"
and then I've picked it up.
You have watched
over me all these
years,
and I've waited till
now to thank you.