Do the right thing

Why is it so difficult for us to do the right thing?  When I was young I once went to a store to buy some plants and when I came out I realized that the teller had failed to charge me for one of the items.  I started to go back to pay for it, $3,  and the person with me couldn't believe I would do that.  I'd gotten away without paying and it was a big store anyway so why not take the money and run?  How many times have we all done something like that?  Myself included.  It's so easy to take the money and run, and so hard to do the right right thing.  It starts young and it pervades our lives.  My daughter told me that she recently went to a community pool with one of her children.  The other two boys were playing ball at the adjacent field and when they were done she opened the back gate to let them in.  My grandson said "mommy, we didn't pay" and she went out and did, thank God (or maybe me.)  She told me her first reaction was to say  "Shh, nobody will know."  That's what they said at Enron.  That's what they said at Goldmann Sachs.  That's what Nixon said.  That's what we say to ourselves when we cheat on our taxes.  Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young once wrote "Teach your children well..."  And so we must, or sneaking in back doors will enable them to sneak through life without taking responsibility for having integrity.  
Why is it so difficult to do the right thing?  Businessmen with more money than they know how to spend commit fraud and abuse to further their business.  And even when it's not abuse they make decisions based on money instead of doing the right thing.  Politicians who've reached the pinnacle of their careers still take money from lobbyists and vote against their conscience or lose their conscience all together.  They've just forgotten how to do the right thing.
We have recently witnessed the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, a disaster of unsurpassed proportion (the subject of a future blog.)  It is not so terribly surprising to me.  The incentive to make more money forces us to increasingly push the bubble in every endeavor we undertake, without the proper safeguards.  It would serve everyone well to constantly remember that a history of past performance does not insure future rewards.  So now everyone is screaming that drilling 1 mile under the ocean requires more oversight and this terrible environmental disaster should have been foreseen and prevented.  And yet, many of those people screaming the loudest were shouting "Drill, baby, drill" only a few months ago.  More importantly, oil companies know that they continually pollute our environment in rain forests and in oceans.  They know that what they do is bad but are incapable of doing the right thing.  Maybe we should begin to look at preventative measures before the disaster.  Maybe we should look at existing nuclear reactors to see if they're safe enough, or the food industry or coal mining or...You get the point.  It would take more money, drive profits down but it would be the right thing to do.    For whatever reason we have no integrity as a human race.  Let's wake up and understand that doing the right thing is a must.  If we don't teach our children to pay for the $1 toy instead of stealing it, we will never stop the abuse in government and business, the pollution of our planet the murder of innocent victims in third world countries...the very end of the human race.