Decisions

Imagine if you can a bright autumn afternoon. You’re walking across the UNCW campus having just aced your AP exam. A cool, but not chilling, breeze whips into your lungs and fills your senses with a feeling of complete tranquility. You throw up a wave to a friend and give a shy smile to a passing stranger. As you admire the sunbeams ricocheting off the grass, something catches your eye. An object. A simple object that has no earthly business lying among the landscaped green. You study this object with a curious eye and suddenly find yourself magnetized. You look around to see if anybody’s watching as you swoop down and snatch the item. It’s a wallet. Upon opening the wallet, you find credit cards, a student ID card, pictures, and seven crisp one hundred dollar bills. What do you do?

Take it. Nobody saw you pick it up. Finders keepers, losers weepers, right? You could really use that money. You could pay off a credit card, finish your Christmas shopping, or even put a substantial down payment on that new guitar you’ve been looking at. What possibilities. Today is definitely your day. First the exam and now a little bonus. Besides, whoever lost the wallet could obviously afford to buy a new one. Why would anyone be carrying around that much money? Things aren’t always easy but it’s times like these that reward you for your whole hearted efforts. Free money just walked into your life.

But wait. Do you really want to take that money? Just stop and think for a couple of minutes. What if that was your wallet? Wouldn’t you want someone to turn it in? There is no such thing as free money. Everything comes with a price tag. Maybe the whole thing is a test. Maybe someone placed that wallet there for the sole purpose of seeing if it would be returned. You could be on film right now and not even know it. And how would that look for your character when you‘re asked about why you didn’t return it? You don’t really need this money. It’s just government paper with some numbers on it; it comes and it goes. Not to mention the fact that you did nothing to earn this money and even if you don’t get caught, that doesn’t make it anything less than stealing.

To some people, this decision would be natural as breathing. To others, the vast complications in making a decision would turn their brains into a superhighway of chaos. In an ideal society, anyone who stumbled across a lost wallet would see that it gets back to the rightful owner. But reality is no fairy tale world. For so long have the righteous people of society struggled to keep moral beliefs a part of American culture only to be undermined by the greedy and apathetic. I would return the wallet to the rightful owner. The main reason I would do this is because I have been raised to do the right thing. However, my upbringing was in no way blinded to the evil entities of the world. The exposure to such things has left me watching my back every step of the way. I would do the right thing but I would never expect everyone to make the same decision. Such an occurrence of honesty would be a paradox in an imperfect society.