Maybe it’s karma that my carma (ooh bad pun!) got broken into twice this year. See when I was 17/18 my friend and I got into the habit of shoplifting things. I don’t remember how it started but we started doing it all the time. We took everything—I don’t think I payed for much other than gas for that year. We went to stores like office supply stores and got organizers, calculators, labelers. We went to video stores and got movies and video games. We took things like drills and electric screw drivers from hardware stores. We even took a camcorder and a playstation from one store.
We only came close to getting caught once– my friend was stopped by a manager and asked, I don’t remember how he asked it but it was fairly obvious he thought that my friend has pocketed something. The thing was that my friend had not pocketed anything—I had. I had like three movies in my pockets. I think my friend got stopped because he was not white.
Near the end of the year while my parents where on vacation my friends and I took all the stuff we had lifted over the past year (or what we still had) and set it out on the floor. It covered every inch of the floor in the living room. It was bad—it really was a habit. We did not even think twice about it when why did it.
We never really said ‘OK, we have to stop,’ but we stopped withing a month or so of that. For a while afterwords we still took little things now and then but that faded soon too. It just kind of stopped. Which is funny because it was that fall that I started college and got into ethics. Which would have put a stop to shoplifting anyway. Though I don’t know if I would have gotten into ethics as much as I did if it had not been for knowing how unethical I had been and how lucky I was that I did not get caught and thereby screw up my life with a criminal record.
So maybe it is karma catching up with me that my truck has been broken into twice this year and such—thought I would think I had payed for all the shoplifting back when Teresa took everything I owned… But then again I don’t really believe in karma…