Consequences

If you're of my generation, then you remember vacuum tube radios. You remember vacuum tube televisions. You remember turning on a radio or TV and having to let it "warm up" before it would work. The vacuum tubes literally had to heat up before they would work. 

Then along came transistor radios. They were amazing; they produced sound the instant they were turned on, no warm-up required. I bought my first transistor radio from a mail order company named Olsen. I paid for it with money I had earned by delivering the morning newspaper. The radio had six transistors, as it proudly proclaimed on the front of the case. I bought a rechargeable battery for it, too. It was shaped like a regular 9 volt battery, but when the battery ran down, you could plug it into a little charger that came with the battery, then plug the charger and battery into a wall outlet. It was cheap but it worked.

One day when I was 15 or 16, I left my radio in my dad's car while I helped him work on an old house he had purchased to be rental property. The house wasn't in a good part of town, and so when we came back to his car to go home, the radio was gone. It had been stolen.

I bought another radio. This one was slightly better (and larger) and it contained 8 transistors, a fact that it, too, proudly proclaimed on the front of the radio. Still, there was a place in my heart for that 6 transistor radio. You only buy your first transistor radio once. 

But frankly, I would never have stolen a cheap transistor radio, because at age 15 I had too much self-respect to make myself into a common thief. What's a common thief? When you steal billions of dollars from investors with a bitcoin scam, you're a financial genius. When you steal a cheap transistor radio, you're a common thief. Plus, I didn't know for sure if there was a heaven, but I knew that I didn't want to throw away my shot at getting there on an act of petty thievery. I should note that this was neither the first nor the last act of petty theft I would experience.

The world is full of thieves, and it's full of good people, too. There are people who will give their lives to save yours, even though they don't know you. Maybe the petty thieves I've encountered later woke up and learned to have a little self-respect, so that "petty thief" won't be the only item on their life's resume. I hope so, because, as the preachers and the philosophers have pointed out, our actions are balanced by consequences. Ignore that fact at your own peril. In the end, you only get what you give. It's called karma.