Does Only A Little Matter A Lot?

We had maybe two-dozen near-two-pound trout in the pond.  They were pets.   Each had a name – Fish 1, Fish 2, etc.  We’d kept a few behind from the 6,500 one-pound trout we release each April at Bill’s Boathouse.  The plan, as we have done in past years, was to raise these few holdovers until they were about five pounds each, let them go then start over.

Jokingly we called it our bait testing tank - jokingly, because anything, the remains of your baloney sandwich even, would be engulfed.  Large Rainbow Trout at feeding time come rocketing upward as pellets hit the water, their wide-open mouths gaping white against the dark depths of the pool, breaking the surface with a violent lashing of their tail, spraying unsuspecting onlookers with water as they crash back heavily on their side revealing a fleeting flash of red, only to do it again.

It was awesome. 

But they’re not there anymore.    

At first we thought it was the usual suspects.  We’ve been warning fishermen lately of four-legged thieves: otters.  We’d issue buckets to the fishermen since the trout they put on a stringer were likely not to be there when they went home
for the day.  Not even fish floating in floating baskets with lids were safe.  Otters
have even been so bold as to engage in a tug-of-war right on the dock with
fishermen, the prize being the trout on the end of the line.

The numbers of trout in the pet pond have been dwindling by the day. A few here, a few there, surreptitiously lifted when no one is watching perhaps by otters, perhaps by teenagers like the two I chased up the hill after their line snapped in their hurry to flee, a trout left behind sporting a yellow spinner - and a tracer of blood - as evidence.

In the big picture, what’s the big deal?  If it’s otters, they’re doing what they do.  But kids?  Is this what they do? 

At first there were a lot of trout in the tank, so likely no second-thoughts as to how easy and how many.  But if there were second thoughts, was there a third? A fourth?

“The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty”  is a book by Dan Ariely reviewed by David Brooks, op-ed columnist in the June 8 New York Times. Brooks relates Ariely’s account of $150,000 missing from the $400,000 in annual revenue generated from sales in the gift shop at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.  Interestingly an investigation revealed no one volunteer had embezzled a lot but rather “dozens of elderly art lovers were each pilfering a little.”

Of course in our own city of Lakewood we should be expecting the trial to commence soon for a over a relatively little amount of time  illustrating that respected adults – those who wear the badge, those in charge of the books, anyone – even sweet elderly art connoisseurs with access to the bucks – have the same propensity to take what’s not theirs making them thieves all – four-legged or otherwise.

Or does it?

If, according to one of the themes of Ariely’s book, “nearly everybody cheats, but usually only a little” does the little that’s lifted make them necessarily bad?

Brooks calls this rationalization the “Good Person Construct.”

The idea is that everybody is doing it; it was only a little; and in reality, in contrast to really big, bad misdeeds, who’s the worse – or the worst?  As long as one’s personal balance sheet – doing more good and less evil – reflects a surplus on the positive side of the ledger we come out ok, right?

Recently I wrote an article about . On a 25-foot tape measure such a small increment hardly shouts for attention but my fifth-grade mentee last week understood quite clearly just how important that little bit was.  When we came to the end of the sidewalk and I was a whopping two-feet ahead of him – me using an accurate measurement and him a deceitfully, purposefully, off-by-three-eighths-for-every-six-inches ruler, his countenance progressively changed from being initially and blissfully ignorant to declaring, “Hey!  What’s going on here?”

Brooks, in The Times, makes this observation: “Obviously there’s a measurement problem. You can buy a weight scale to get an objective measure of your diet. But you can’t buy a scale of virtues to put on the bathroom floor.”

As we sat there at the end of the sidewalk at the end of the school day near the end of his education at least for this school year; and as parents arrived to pick up their children, stepping over our out-stretched rulers in the process, I folded over a piece of paper by three-eighths of an inch - having confessed to being a poor role model after all - and asked this 12-year-old how important that little bit was.

“Very!” was his reply.