April 10th: Going Straight

I am a bad person! Or, at least I was rather naughty the other day. Not so much so that the police are after or that God will never talk to me again, but enough to have mildly irritated a couple of people for 20 or 30 seconds. My crime was simple: after having ordered and paid for two coffees at the Tim Horton’s drive-thru, I then proceeded to ask for another two coffees. I did this not because I had forgotten what I should have ordered, but in order to avoid paying the Harmonized sales tax. You see, in the bizarre mathematics of Canada’s HST, ordering four coffees at once would have added 45 cents to the order, above and beyond what the normal cost would have been. Not wanting to pay this ridiculous government money grab, I ordered coffee twice, causing a slight delay in the line up. My bad!
While I may have irked the motorists behind me and caused some mild cursing at the Tim’s order desk, my crime was not a great one. Still, I hereby apologize to anyone whose nose may have been put out of joint by my thoughtless actions yesterday. While not hugely so, it was still wrong of me to delay the folks behind me, no matter how good my excuse might have been.
OK, so maybe my deed was not entirely justified, even if it was the most petty of misdemeanors for the most justifiable of motives. It does, however, illustrate a point. Excuses are rampant. Folks are always going off the rails and then justifying their actions for some reason or another. At times, like mine, the damage isn’t too great. All too often, the hurt is significant, so much so that no amount of back-peddling or self-justification can cover the pain. The trouble is that it’s easy to start small and build up to greater and greater things. One small, seemingly righteous act of wrong-doing can lead to far bigger and better (in a bad way) crimes and misdemeanors. Pardon the cliche, but it’s a slippery slope if you’re not aware of the path you’re headed on. I’m not saying that my Tim’s adventure has now opened me up to committing a string of high-profile art thefts, but it might make other peccadilloes seem OK.
The cure for this ailment is two-fold. Try to do the right thing the first time ‘round and own up to your mistake if you blow it. No excuses, no justification, no covering up the wrong with a good sounding explanation, just don’t do it, and if you do, take responsibility and don’t do it again. I know, I know it’s easier said than done, because we are short on time, don’t have enough money or just find some things too irritating to do, but both in the short and the long run, the best way to be a good person is simply not to do the wrong thing.