Cold, Hard, Unforgiving Consequences

My daughter Stephany and I were at the mall last night looking for a particular cd.  We never saw the cd, but unfortunately we saw something that will stay with us even longer.

There were a few teenagers walking past one of those small jewelry stores that cater to young people.  They were staring in at something that interested them greatly.  Of course, being nosey parkers, my daughter and I had to look in and see what was going down.  Unfortunately it wasn’t pretty.  A very young girl, in tears, was being handcuffed by a police officer as the worker and a few customers looked on.  When my daughter (who was about this girl’s age) and I left the mall entrance, we saw her (still in tears) being put into the back of the police car.  The officer was talking to her, trying to calm her down - and I’m thinking, “As if!”

At some point last night at least one parent got, not the worst call a parent could ever get, but close to it.

What could have been worth all of that?  The humiliation, the fear, having to look your parents in the eye, getting a police record, etc.  A $5.00 necklace?  A High School Musical sticker set?  A dare from a friend?  You could have combined everything in the entire store and none of it was worth any one of those nightmares.  I kept wondering all night, Why would someone do something so stupid?!  Then it hit me - the same reason we all do stupid things:  We don’t stop to think about the consequences.

When we speed, we don’t stop to think about the humiliation and inconvenience of getting pulled over.  We certainly don’t think about the cost of the ticket.  If we did, we wouldn’t speed because we’d realize that it just isn’t worth it. 

When we overeat, we aren’t thinking about our waistline, our Levi’s that keep shrinking, or our health - we’re thinking about what’s left on the buffet that we haven’t tried yet.  If we stopped long enough to picture the rearview….. you get the idea.

Consequences!  Robert Green Ingersoll once said there are no rewards or punishments in nature, only consequences.   He makes a great point.  What makes it especially hard to live with consequences is the fact that we’re the ones that invited them into our life.

It’s a short post with just a few short thoughts.  And those thoughts are:

1. We would save ourselves a great deal of stress and grief if we’d start engaging our brains before we engage anything else.  We shouldn’t just drive up to a potential action…we should drive all the way around it, taking a really close look at it from all angles.  Consequences should be dealt with before they happen.  They’re total bitches if they’re allowed to call the shots.
2. We should all tell our kids about the young girl who was handcuffed in front of other kids and put into the back of a police vehicle. Sometimes putting something on their level, in a way they can relate to, will go a lot further than, “Don’t do it, because it’s wrong and I said not to!”

No punishments, no rewards.  Just consequences.