Gone are the days when I could keep my doors unlocked and leave the keys in my car.  Forget about leaving a chair in the front yard, and definitely not a bicycle.  They would be gone in the blink of an eye.

Cars are protected with burglar alarms and Lojack, restaurant tables and chairs are chained to posts on their patio, and just the other day I noticed that garbage cans are all chained to posts in supermarket parking lots.  Tsk, tsk, not even garbage cans are safe anymore.

Items delivered to homes from places like Amazon are stolen within minutes of the delivery, not to mention that houses are being robbed at an average rate of 3.7 million each year. 

Obviously, the bigger picture is identity thefts, credit card fraud and embezzlement of people’s life savings. Then, of course, there’s adult and child trafficking not that I wanted to go there, but these are the ugly facts that are happening in our world.

When I was in the 2nd grade my father had given me a real cool mechanical pencil with 4 different color leads.  I was the only one in the class of 54 kids to have a pencil like that.  I noticed that a girl in my class had just gotten the same exact pencil.  Wow!  What are the chances?  This girl came from an affluent family and swore up and down that this was her pencil.  Yes, I did prove that it was mine, but I still wonder to this day why she stole it and then lied about it.  Her parents would have bought her a crate full if she had asked. 

In my opinion the reason why everything, no matter what it is or who owns it, is being taken is because people are greedy or needy. In both scenarios, they have no respect for other people’s property. The needy can get help through social & public agencies and the greedy are, to put it bluntly, extremely bad people.

It seems that today’s mantra is, “I want it, I’ll take it; now it’s mine!”