It Isn’t Mine
When Sweetheart and I were on vacation, if you will remember, we rented a cabin in the woods for a weekend. One day, as we were taking a little hike on one of the trails, we came upon a women who was raking debris. She said that she also cleaned the cabins when people checked out. I told her which cabin we were renting and she remarked that it was a nice, little cabin and hoped we were enjoying it.
Well, Sweetheart and I like to make little impact on our environment. We don’t need a lot of things to make us happy. When we weren’t hiking, or visiting in the surrounding area, he put together a 300-word puzzle and I started reading one of the books I had picked up at a second-hand book store. We took care to use only the towels that we absolutely needed and I kept the dishes washed up after every meal. We only used one bedroom, so the linens in the extra bedroom were never touched.
When we left, I stripped the bed clothes off the bed and piled all of the towels in the bathroom sink. The only thing that indicated we had been there was the clean dishes standing in the dish drainer.
As I was using the cabin and the facilities, it reminded me of my mother’s admonitions as I was growing up. We never owned a house, so we always rented the houses we lived in. Mom would say, “Take care of everything. It isn’t ours.” However, I would come across people, in my wanderings as a child, who did not believe in that philosophy. In fact, they believed the exact opposite. “Why take care of it? It isn’t ours.” was their philosophy.
As Sweetheart and I traveled from Florida to Gatlinburg, TN, we drove through a section of highway (should I say, bi-way) where many of the houses and yards were in much disrepair. There were beat up cars in the yard and trash strewn around. Some trash was in bags and some was not. When I talked to someone in Gatlnburg, he said those people didn’t seem to care about their living arrangements, because they did not work for a living.
As I pondered the dichotomy of the two philosophies, I began to think of another class of people who have two different ways of looking at things. Politicians! Almost every day I hear that Congress has appropriated millions/billions of dollars for one thing or another. Do they think they can tax and spend indiscriminately because the money isn’t theirs? Are their some politicians who say they must take care of the money, because it isn’t theirs? I would like to meet them, if there are.