That's a stupid thing to say, don't you think?  Of course, it's easy to be born stupid, or to be born rich, or Irish, or anything else one can be born to.  Mom does all the work and you have nothing to do but to be.  But how can it be easy to be stupid?  Doesn't stupidity make life a lot harder?  Don't geniuses have it a lot easier by virtue of their intelligence?

Think again, birdbrain.  In school, in the military, in just about any occupation or profession I can think of, higher expectations and greater burdens are laid on the "smart" ones.  When there is a demanding, challenging task to be done, is the boss going to assign it to a stupid guy?  No.  The stupid ones, and those who are good at faking stupidity, not only get out of a lot of hard work, they get excused for their mistakes:  "It's not his fault he's stupid."  Nobody in this world gets cut more slack by their fellow beings than the stupid jerks... especially the goodlooking ones.

Then there is the terrific cost in emotional terms when a smart person does something stupid -- and we all do make mistakes.  No idiot is going to be beating himself up over a blunder, saying, "I shoulda known better," when the idiots know for a fact that they don't know any better.  For a quarter of a century, I have been occasionally (even an obsessive/compulsive perfectionist has to let up sometimes) berating myself for scoring only 99.94% on the 4Sigma World's Hardest IQ Test, thinking, "I should have tried harder, spent more time on it, gone back and checked my answers again.  Maybe I coulda made it if I hadn't been smoking dope."  Now that's stupid!

All kidding aside, it is very easy,relatively speaking, to be stupid.  Being "smart" or wise, or behaving intelligently, following complex instructions, staying focused on a series of tasks as you solve problems of ever-increasing difficulty, inventing or modifying tools to accomplish your tasks, adapting to change, thinking on your feet, and all that -- that's NOT easy.  Do that sort of thing long enough and you wind up feeling like you're carrying more than your share of the world's burden.

Of course, a smart person in that situation would feel he was carrying more than his share, because he truly would be carrying more than his share, and a genius is going to notice such things.  Only extraordinary people conduct their lives in such a manner.  Ordinary people either are too stupid to do those things or just smart enough to act stupid so they won't be expected to do all that.  Unless our hypothetical smart high achiever also has the emotional wisdom and psychological skills to release his tension, he will end up with stress related physical disease, or his mind will just go... away... awry... gaga... bonkers... batshit crazy.  And isn't that stupid?

Stupidity is not only easy to endure.  Few things in life are any easier to achieve.  All anyone has to do to be stupid, or to be virtually indistinguishable from stupid, is to stop thinking for himself, stop trying to solve his own and the world's problems, and believe unquestioningly what he is told by his elders, his teachers, the government, the clergy and the media.  What could be simpler than that?

Why is it, I wonder, that the average IQ of convicted felons in prison is higher than that of the general population?  I know that the true answer to this question isn't simple.  A number of different factors are involved.  For one thing, stupid people are more likely to accept rules and obey laws unquestioningly.  For another, the criminal career of a relatively stupid nonconformist is likely to be shorter than that of a brilliant plotter, so it may never rise above the misdemeanor level.  Also, there are other institutions, alternatives to prison, for criminals with seriously low IQs, the ones who once were called morons, cretins, imbeciles, etc.  Out here in the general population, their more law abiding peers are free to lower the average.

This little rant has been festering and fermenting in my mind for a week or so.  I talked to Greyfox about it and apparently triggered a nightmare for him -- at least, for me, dreaming of being at a Mensa convention would be a nightmare.  I nursed my rant and nurtured it, let some of the original venom mellow out of it, until today I felt that my thoughts about stupidity were relatively rational, and almost sane enough to share with you.

Here are some other crazy people's thoughts on stupidity:

The questions below were generated by my post yesterday on Pluto, Eris, and the outer planet pavane.

Just off the top of my head, since Libra is symbolized by the scales of justice, I think your generation could end up bringing war criminals like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, et.al., to justice.  All Air signs tend to be into communication and the arts.  Every one of you, as individuals, may have an impact through artistic work and/or exercising your First Amendment rights. 

Some of you undoubtedly have already laid "life, fortune, and sacred honor" on the line, and your generation and others will go on doing so, but I don't see the vehemence and violence happening with you in the massive way it did with us in the 'sixties and early 'seventies.  Don't forget, even in the Leo Pluto generation, not everyone was against the war.  Antiwar demonstrations were resented, and there were violent counter-demonstrations.  In the end, the impact of a mass movement is just a collection of individual impacts.

There is much insight that can be gained from a "solar" chart, for noon on the day you were born, if you don't know the time.  It would provide a reasonably accurate sign placement, within a degree or so, for the Sun and all the planets.  The Moon is the only body that might be significantly out of place, and you would not have accurate locations for the Ascendant, Midheaven and houses.  

It is possible to work from what the solar chart reveals, and derive a close approximation of time of birth, too.  This is much easier for some people than for others.  For example, in my natal chart, nearly everything is concentrated in the two adjacent signs of Virgo and Libra.  By the time I was in my teens, anyone who knew me well and knew astrology would have been able to guess that those two signs were in my ninth and tenth houses.

Numerous clues that can be derived from planetary placements in a solar chart, pairs of opposite signs that are "intercepted" (enclosed within a "house" without being on any "cusp" or line between houses), the "duplicated" pairs of signs that result from such interceptions, and various other data can enable an astrologer (with input from the person for whom the chart was calculated) derive an approximate sign/house overlay.

To get started with a free solar chart, enter your date and place of birth in the form at Astrolabe, giving 12 PM (noon) as the time.  This gives you a chart that you can save to your hard drive or copy and paste someplace.  It is at most twelve hours away from your precise birth time, which will have been sometime during the AM or PM of that day.  Then you can either turn that over to an astrologer who knows you already, or to one who is willing to interview you and try to derive your house overlay, or you can take some astrology lessons (this is just one of many online sources) and do the overlay yourself.

Some Alaskans are viewing the stories all over the front page of today's Anchorage Daily News as "bad news," showing our state in a negative light.  That's not how I see it, nor am I as surprised as some people appear to be.  We have been waiting for this since last July when FBI agents raided the offices and residences of several state legislators.

Yesterday in Juneau Representative Vic Kohring of Wasilla:

[photo credit Brian Wallace]

...Pete Kott of Eagle River;

[photo credit Chris Miller / The Associated Press]

...and Bruce Weyhrauch (left) of Juneau, who has been reportedly drinking and/or drugging more heavily than usual of late, and may have either attempted suicide or staged a failed disappearing act last month,

[photo credit Chris Miller / The Associated Press]

were arraigned on indictments for extortion, bribery, wire fraud and mail fraud.

In astrology, if the dance of the "inner" planets, close to the Sun:  Moon (a "light" to astrologers, more influential than a mere planet), Mercury, Venus,  Mars and Jupiter, which most clearly define individual personality in the natal chart, can be likened to a boogie, the outer planets dance a stately pavane.

Pluto, for example, stays in each sign so long that we see its influence affecting entire generations.  Both of my parents were born at the time of the "organization men", with Pluto in Gemini (father b.1905, mother b.1911), with Uranus opposite Neptune.  Though dissatisfied with their lot in life, they remained conservative and traditional along with their contemporaries, striving upward through their organizations, working within the system.

I was a "war baby" (WWII-1944), born with Uranus in Gemini, trine Neptune in Libra with Pluto in Leo.   We became the leaders for the '60s generation.  Impulsive, confident, spontaneous, restless rebels with a
cause, many of us have proven to be too
fickle or adaptable to remain true to the great ideals of our youth.
Muhammed
Ali, Joan Baez, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Richard Gephardt, Newt Gingrich, Tom Hayden,
Jimi Hendrix, Jesse Jackson, Mick Jagger, and Janis Joplin were all war babies.

My husband, Greyfox the ArmsMerchant, is one of the first of the baby boomers.  They still had Pluto in Leo, and the later arrivals among them had Uranus square Neptune.  Idealistic, confident and exhibitionistic but without the original flair of the war babies, they became the shock troops of the psychedelic sixties.  They comprised the largest wave of hippies and the first wave of yuppies.  This group includes Cher, Bill Clinton, Kevin Costner, Billy Crystal, Al Gore Jr.,
Jay Leno, David Letterman, Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Jerry Seinfeld, Bruce Springsteen, Robin Williams, and Oprah Winfrey.

My children ranged from the last of the baby boomers (Pluto in Virgo) into the latter part of Generation X (Pluto in Libra), and overlapped with my oldest grandchildren.  Now I have grandchildren and great grandchildren in Generation Y, with Pluto in Scorpio.  I started thinking about this a few nights ago as Greyfox and I discussed the differences between the antiwar movement of the 60s and the one now. 

Our Leo-Pluto generation was fiery and in-your-face about it.  The airy twenty- to thirty-somethings with Pluto in Libra desire peace but can't see any sense in fighting to obtain it.  The teens to twenty-somethings with Pluto in the water sign Scorpio, if they become interested in ending war as more than just a philosophical exercise, are more likely to go at it covertly such as by hacking into military computer systems, than by any more overt means.  The kids not yet into adolescence, born with Pluto in Sagittarius, are just beginning to show us how their generation might express Sagittarian idealism and pride.  For girls in that age group, princess costumes are the favorite Halloween getup.

My gratitude and appreciation go to Alan Meece, from whose work I extracted a small portion of his vast amount of information on the generations of Pluto.   I am also indebted to the international astronomical community for their hotly-debated decision to delineate a new category of orbital bodies, the dwarf planets.  When they downgraded Pluto from full planethood, they also upgraded the "cometary planetoid" Chiron, the former asteroid Ceres, and the more recently discovered objects, Quaoar, Sedna, Orcus and Eris.

Astrologers get as excited over the discovery of new planets as astronomers do, or even more so.  Big new developments on this planet often coincide with discoveries out in space.  For example, Herschel's discovery of Uranus occurred around the time of the French and American revolutions and the English colonization of Australia.

In 1977, the year Chiron was discovered, astronomers also discovered that there are rings around Uranus.  That year China's "Gang of Four" was expelled from power, the last known natural case of smallpox occurred, the first female Episcopal priest was ordained, Janet Guthrie became the first woman to qualify for the Indy 500, and the movies Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were released.

We have been observing Chiron for long enough to have gotten some clarity and consensus on its significance.  Most astrologers now agree that it relates to healing, and some of us connect it to transpersonal shamanic experience.  Knowing that I have Chiron conjunct my natal Sun, square my Ascendant, has given me a lot of insight into my life experience this time around, and has drawn a few knowing looks from other astrologers, too.

Quaoar is being linked to the Indigos.  It takes about 23 years to transit each sign, and its orbit ranges from between Uranus and Pluto to beyond Pluto's orbit, connecting the known to the unknown as Chiron has linked the "personal" planets sunward from Saturn with the "transpersonal" of Uranus and beyond.  At my birth, it conjoined my Chiron-Sun conjunction in Virgo.  If you want to see where it was when you were born, look here.

The Eris of mythology was the Goddess of Discord, sister of war god Mars, mother of Dysnomia, the spirit of lawlessness.  The dwarf planet Eris is bigger than Pluto, farther away, and has one known moon, named Dysnomia.  Named by astronomers, not astrologers, it is being studied by astrologers, some of whom agree that it seems to be associated with strife and ambition.

Eris has been in Aries since 1928 and will remain in that sign until the mid-twenty-first century.  Everyone now alive has Eris in either Pisces or Aries.  Eris in my natal chart is at 5°43'Aries, opposite Neptune, quincunx Mercury and the asteroid Vesta, trine Pluto, square Saturn.  Look here for an Eris ephemeris to locate it in your natal chart.

Because Orcus has an orbital period and size roughly the same as Pluto's, astronomers gave it a designation that is just another name for the god of the underworld.  Highly elliptical, the orbit extends from within that of Uranus to beyond Pluto's orbit.  Astrologers know that Orcus's significance lies in the transpersonal realm and are studying it to refine their understanding.  Orcus was at 18°56'Gemini at my birth, conjunct my natal Uranus, sextile natal Juno, and trine the natal conjunction of Venus and Mars at my Midheaven.  The Orcus ephemeris is here.

Sedna is 1,000 miles in diameter, the largest body discovered in the solar system since Pluto.  Its orbit takes 10,500 years, so Greyfox and I, born about 3 years apart, both have Sedna at about the twenty-second degree of Aries in our charts, which places it smack in the already crowded midst of my intense curse/blessing pattern.  That ephemeris is here.  The Inuit myth of the goddess Sedna is here.  A discussion of the dwarf planet's astrological significance is here.

Two years ago, thousands of old hippies, historians, and antiwar activists commemorated the thirty-fifth anniversary of the incident at Kent State University in which Ohio National Guardsmen fired into a panicked crowd of fleeing demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine others.  Two years ago people were still asking the same questions that many of us asked in 1970:  Who gave the order to fire?  Were the troops aiming, shooting to kill, or were they firing indiscriminately into the crowd?  This week, as Vietnam-era antiwar activist Tom Hayden, Iraq war protester Cindy Sheehan, and many others gather at Kent State for another anniversary, we may be getting closer to some answers.

    You know, you see these bums, you know, blowin' up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are, burnin' up the books, I mean, stormin' around about this issue, I mean, you name it - get rid of the war, there'll be another one.

    -- Richard Nixon, New York Times, May 2, 1970

Tricky Dickie Nixon's words were bullshit, of course.  We knew it then and the history of the past three decades has proven it.  Since the end of U. S. involvement in Vietnam, most university students have focused on having fun.  Many of them have gotten degrees and some have gotten a useful education.  Student demonstrations against the Iraq war have been quiet, peaceful, and ignored by the Bush administration.  The object lesson of Kent State sank in deep and stayed with us.

One man's quest

The late Charles A. Thomas spent more than 3 decades investigating many of the unresolved issues in the 1970 Kent State shootings

Charles A. Thomas was a 32-year-old specialist in vintage radio recordings at the National Archives in 1975 when he was given the task of cataloging the film footage of the Kent State shootings that occurred on May 4, 1970.

As he began cataloging the film, Thomas made a disturbing finding: None of the footage showing dead and wounded students after the lethal volley had been used in the public hearings of the Scranton Commission in the months following the shootings.

Suspicious, Thomas pulled the sound tapes that had been played at the hearings and found that the moments when students were shouting loudest at the guardsmen had been spliced to occur just before the shootings, eliminating the disturbing lull before the shots could be heard on the original tape.

Akron Beacon Journal

If Canfora is correct, that one word, "point," and the distances involved in the fatal shots, seem to support the idea that the firing was indiscriminate.  Some of the guardsmen might have been aiming at specific students.  Maybe none of them was aiming at all, and only "pointing" their weapons into the fleeing crowd, as ordered.  Is that relevant?  I don't know.  The big questions in my mind have to do with the Iraq war and the current state of the antiwar movement.  Are we going to have to put our lives on the line again for the sake of peace?  Are enough of us willing to do it?

Kent State student John Filo won a Pulitzer Prize for this photo
of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling beside the body of Jeffrey Miller.

You can read a first-person account of the events at Kent State from John Filo's roommate, Alan King.

An audio file is available HERE.

May 4 Task Force timeline

THIS

There are still no green leaves on the trees here, but the pussywillows have grown large.  Walking through the woods today, I ended up with pollen all over me, my hair, clothes, camera, lenses, cats, etc.
 

Here and now, life is good.  I have tried, really seriously tried, to stop thinking, speaking and writing in dualistic terms.  I have not been able to eliminate all the absolute dualisms from my lexicon, but I have cut way down on their usage.  Recently I have referred to "evil" in quotes, while making a point about someone else's beliefs, and I have almost entirely stopped even thinking of things as "bad."  This must be partially from my effort to transcend dualism, and partially from my old Bushido training where I was conditioned to "cycle from positive to neutral."  I certainly have no reason to complain because I have banished bad and evil before being able to drop the opposite extreme.  Life is GOOD.

The temperature dropped to below freezing last night, so I got out there early this morning while the ice crust over the muskeg was still hard enough to support me.  Hilary, above, came out to meet me.  She has apparently moved into the nearby abandoned house with the feral colony.  Maybe there she can have a room of her own.  Here, there are too many rowdy kittens and smelly tomcats.

This is what Hilary and I were walking on.  I stayed on the places where the ice is supported by ground underneath and avoided places where I know that it is just a crust suspended over holes.  It grows thinner each day, and is riddled with holes.

Muffin (on the stump) and Max followed me from the house.  Faust -- AKA "Bobito" because he's nearly identical (except for scars) to his older brother Bobo -- was out there, too, but he is camera shy.

I have been experimenting with my Fuji, which I seldom use because it offers more options and is therefore more challenging to use than the older Kodak.  Finally, I am beginning to feel comfortable and reasonably competent with the Fuji, now that it's so old and obsolete that I'm having trouble finding extra memory for it.  Gotta get some memory!

When Doug noticed I'd been gone a while, he and Granny Mousebreath came out looking for me and I picked my way over the broken ice sheet, waded through the weeds and bushes, scrambled up the bank of the roadside ditch, and limped home.

I have posted fewer than half of the shots I captured on this morning's walk.  If the bleakness of breakup isn't more than you can stand, you can see them all on my photoblog.

Greyfox provided an update to the story of the people who moved out and left so much behind, including a couple of bags full of dirty socks.  Mike, his landlord, said that they left owing him a month's rent, probably about $500 give or take a hundred or so, for that cabin.  This probably explains why they just left their key in the door instead of returning it to him.  I'd say they were embarrassed, or else afraid of his reaction.  If they were afraid of him, they never got to know Mike.  He is about as laissez faire as a landlord can be.  He hates having to go to court to get people evicted, so he sometimes lets them run months late on the rent before he takes action.

They might not have been aware of the laws governing landlord-tenant relations, eviction, and such.  I was surprised, when I worked at the crisis hotline in Anchorage, to learn how many people didn't know their rights and responsibilities as renters, and what they could legally require and expect from their landlords.  Alaska law makes it difficult for a landlord to evict tenants, probably because of the climate.  In winter, lots of people (mostly those who have lived here most of their lives -- it's not a custom among newcomers) who live in remote areas leave doors unlocked and either a fire going in the woodstove or one laid and ready to light, in case a traveler needs warmth and shelter while they're gone.

Anyhow, now that I have had a chance to see the sort of things they left behind, I think I was correct in my surmise about some of their clothing having been obtained through shoplifting.  One of them was working at McDonald's and that wouldn't have paid the rent and kept them fed, much less paid for laundry.  Some of their housewares were the sort of things one might find in a thrift store, and others definitely came from Wal-Mart.  The price stickers were still attached, showing that the canisters had been cheap to begin with and were marked down to even less than our local thrift shops usually charge for similar items.

A few of you commented regarding your own shoplifting experiences, and they fall well within the "normal" range.  Most people who shoplift are teenagers, and they are not usually going for things they need.  If they aren't just going for thrills or taking targets of opportunity to impress their friends, they go after small luxury items their parents don't want them to have, or things such as condoms, feminine hygeine products, etc., that they are embarrassed to buy.

While I was doing time in prison for possession of marijuana, in 1970, I met a woman who, along with her sister-in-law, ran a shoplifting ring for profit.  Between them, they had eight children.  The kids provided enough distraction and cover to allow the mothers to get out of stores with amazing hauls of merchandise.  They boosted to order for their friends, and when the opportunity arose they also took things that were easily fenced.  The SIL cut a deal and testified against... oh, let's call her Mrs. Jabba, since I can't recall her name and she looked like Jabba the Hutt -- who was convicted of multiple counts of grand larceny, child endangerment, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and possibly a few more counts I've forgotten.

That's rare, actually.  Thieves with big ambitions can usually find easier, more profitable, and lower-risk crimes to commit.  Aside from the teenage thrill boosters, most adult shoplifters are working at subsistence level, stealing things to use, either because they don't have the money to buy what they need or they are trying to supplement a low income and have some luxuries.  Most of them are in the under-thirty demographic. 

The smallest number of habitual shoplifters are the true compulsive kleptomaniacs.  MRI studies have shown abnormal electrical activity in frontal areas of the brains of some kleptomaniacs.  As with all forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, kleptomaniacs have imbalances of the neurotransmitter serotonin and they usually respond to treatment with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.  Similar abnormalities in neuroelectrochemistry exist in people who are compulsive savers or "packrats" (like me) who tend to accumulate anything and everything for which they think they might ever have a use.

Yaay!  It's raining here, our first precipitation in months, first liquid precip this year.  We really need the moisture, too.  Fire danger is high and there won't be many berries and wildflowers if we don't get more rain.

This weeks photo challenge is hosted by Moonlight_Sonata22

Her subject is Scars (and how you got them)

First, an ultra closeup of my oldest scar:

In second grade, about 55 years ago, running on the playground, I fell and skinned my knee.  The school nurse cleaned the wound and bandaged it.  Several days later, as it had grown sorer and swollen, my father examined the wound closely, then used the tip of his pocket knife (after sterilizing it in the flame of his Zippo lighter) to dig out the piece of gravel that was lodged in my knee.

The next one is more recent:

Over a year ago, this was a third degree burn on my thumb.  I got it from inadvertently gripping the edge of the opening on my woodstove along with the piece of firewood I was trying to reposition in the stove.   The groove is from the subsurface tissue damage.

Zvanoizu said she was, "puzzled and outraged" about the 23.5 pairs of identical dirty socks:

I think I understand. 

First, I want to repeat that I was guessing about how those worn-once-and-unwashed socks came to be discarded.  I really know very little about the people who threw out the clothing.  They also threw out a lot of housewares, appliances, toys, games, etc., that they had been unable to sell during weeks of a yard sale. 

A few days ago, Greyfox noticed that they'd gone away and left the key stuck in the door.  He assumed that the landlord wasn't aware that they'd gone, and told him.  Mike thanked Greyfox for telling him about the key, and gave him the okay to go in and salvage what he could from what they had left in the cabin.  We got dry beans, spices, pasta, baking mixes and other non-perishable foods that we can use.

Theirs is not the way I would now handle such a situation, if I were in their shoes.  I would give stuff away to neighbors, or donate it to charity. But there was a time, when I was much younger, that I might have slipped quietly away as they did, afraid or ashamed to face the landlord and return his key, embarrassed to offer my meager leftovers to neighbors I barely knew.  Possibly their motives were similar to that.  It is also possible that simple narcissistic self-interest and disregard for others motivated them.  Who knows?

Zvanoizu's comment reminded me of a long car trip I took to Fairbanks with a fellow Mensan about thirty years ago.  There was an active local group in Anchorage and a scattering of isolated members in the Fairbanks area.  National Mensa asked the Anchorage LocSec to arrange a meeting of some of those isolated M's and try to get them to organize a local group.  Two of us had the spare time.  Julie, an attorney, drove her car and we spent the first part of the trip getting to know each other better.

After I mentioned my criminal history and prison record, the rest of our conversation centered on political philosophy and social psychology.  Julie was like Zvanoizu, puzzled and outraged.  In response to her direct question about what had motivated me to steal, I related the story of my poverty as a teenage single parent, and my political radicalization by the man who told me that I deserved much better than I had.  He taught me that, "Property is theft."   He said that if someone with more than he needs has something I need but don't have, it isn't wrong to take it.

Julie replied, "But what about the resentment of the people who work for what they have, towards those who steal?"  I countered with, "What about the resentment of those who work and work and still don't have, toward the bosses who have plenty and continue to profit from the work of others?  What about the corrupt politicians and parasitic bureaucrats whose risks of detection are minimal and whose profits are enormous?"  It is an endless argument and one that cannot be won by either side in a system as full of inequities as ours is.  Many voices have been raised in favor of the god-fearing, law-abiding philosophical position, so I will state a few points on the other side.

A few years ago, a British clergyman made news when he spoke out publicly against supermarkets for enticing people to steal.  He was censured by his church superiors, but many people agreed that the man had a valid point.  In Dickensian times, a street urchin might have pressed his nose against the sweet shop window and swooned at the fragrance that wafted out when the door opened, but he would not have been allowed within reach of the merchandise.

Those who make their merchandise available to thieves are inciting to theft.  They purchase shrinkage insurance that minimizes their financial risk and that provides employment to actuaries, clerks, and insurance executives.  By installing security cameras and other antitheft devices, they are supporting technological industries, most of them in Asia.  By hiring security personnel, they are supporting the local economy.  Therefore, in their own way, thieves support the global economy.

Among the folk heroes of our culture are a few thieves, such as Robin Hood, who robbed the rich and gave to the poor, and Pretty Boy Floyd, who robbed banks in the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression and paid off poor farmers' mortgages to those same banks.  Even so, some people, even some thieves, are astonished to learn that there is such a thing as an ethical thief.  Of course, ethics are an individual thing and not all ethical thieves would agree on what that means.  To some, it might mean simply not stealing from one's own friends and not getting caught.  Others only target large corporations with shrinkage insurance, never take more than they need (or donate their surplus to charity), don't use violence, never carry a weapon in a burglary... as I said, ethics are variable.  

Statistically, most thieves will readily steal money, supplies, or merchandise from their employers, take everything from towels to telephones and art from hotel rooms, and cheat on their taxes, but draw the line at shoplifting.  Those, the majority of thieves, responsible for a majority of the annual dollar loss to theft in the U.S., are middle class thieves or even upper class.  The people who steal clean clothes because they cannot afford to use a laundromat are, of course, in the lowest economic classes.  These are the ones with whom I can relate.

Studies suggest that roughly a third of those on the bottom rung of society will steal something they need if the opportunity arises.  The rest will presumably beg or do without.  If the low-class thieves have a little bit of money, they will buy beans or hamburger.  If they are flat broke, they will steal steak or lobster.  If they have a little bit of money, they will launder their old clothes or buy "new" ones at a charity thrift shop such as Salvation Army or Goodwill.  If they are flat broke, they will try to steal something better.  Since the risk is essentially the same, it doesn't make sense to steal cheap or inferior merchandise if one has access to something better.

When I was homeless and penniless, I survived catch-as-catch-can.  Nearly everyone I see at Felony Flats is doing that.  Most of their lives, in the terms used by 12-step programs, are unmanageable.  Each of them copes in the way that he or she has learned.  Some of them are hardworking people going through hard times.  Others are mentally ill, and the fortunate among them have been diagnosed and are receiving some assistance.  It would be inaccurate and misleading to generalize too broadly about the people who live there.  The only thing they really have in common is that all of them are living in substandard housing in a harsh environment.

I live in substandard housing in the same harsh environment, but I have the advantage of owning my squalid hovel, not paying rent.  In the years before Greyfox came along and began providing some money, we did without some things.  I grew some food in the garden and foraged for wild foods.  When Doug was a baby, he didn't wear disposable diapers.  Often I could scrape up enough money for the laundromat.  When I couldn't, I washed our clothes, including his diapers and my dirty handkerchiefs (tissues are a luxury), by hand.  That's how my mother taught me to do things.  I have Scots ancestry on both sides of my family.  I was taught not to waste things.

I am neither puzzled nor outraged at the waste involved in those shopping bags full of dirty socks, and the other serviceable clothing, usable items and perfectly good food Greyfox found in that dumpster.  I can easily guess at motivations, even if I cannot imagine myself doing something like that.  I can understand, even though I don't condone waste.  Neither do I condemn anyone.  I don't do outrage.  Waste appalls me, and by dumpster diving I do what I can to minimize it.  I don't hesitate to scrounge and salvage more than I can use.  I figure there's always someone who can use it.