mine mine mine

Stealing is, of course, not a good thing to do. In Illinois, the penalty for stealing can range from a year’s imprisonment to seven years, and that’s not including the hefty fines that come along with the crippling prison system. That said, neither the law nor general morality has ever stopped me from being  a thief.

When I was a wee lad, I had the propensity to steal- whether it’s something small like a morsel of food, or actual property, like (). It’s honestly hard to keep track of the things I’ve stolen, because there’s too many to count. I stole an iPod case from my friend’s house when I was around 10, because I needed one, and it looked cool. I stole several books from the shelf in my 3rd grade classroom- simply because I was too lazy to return them. I stole some candy from a small Halloween store, for the childish reason of merely craving chocolate.

In all of these cases, I never received any sort of punishment. No police officer ever found me and arrested me for my shoplifting. My 3rd grade teacher never questioned where his copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy went, and apparently the security camera overlooking the vending machine, from which I constantly stole lifesavers from, didn’t catch me in the act. I think that the justice system would take pity on a young child that didn’t know any better, but maybe the experience of getting caught would have dissuaded me from stealing further.

It’s undeniable that if I came face to face with the consequences of my actions, I would have stopped at an earlier age. Maybe if a police officer actually caught me stealing candy, and talked to me or something, I’d have been too scared to continue stealing. I’m not actually sure why I stole as a child- I was totally aware of the laws, and the corresponding moral issues along with stealing. Is it that I was actually evil as a child, or just chose to ignore the rules?

Maybe I never thought about how my actions would have an impact, because I always subconsciously thought of my theft as insignificant. I mean, who’s going to miss a few pieces of Dubble Bubble? The kid that I stole an iPod case from- he might want it back, but it was a flimsy, $2 rubber case anyway. And how important is one roll of Lifesavers to a vending machine?

Yeah, that was my mentality as a kid.

Maybe I was an evil little child, maybe I really didn’t know any better, but another factor could be just that I was trying to be edgy- every child has a rebellious phase. You know how cool it is to shoplift from a store? Not to mention the looks I get when I can steal things from the vending machine. In any case, my childhood was characterized by a tendency to take things that weren’t mine.

Nowadays, I’ve stopped stealing. I think that somewhere along the trail of adolescence, I’ve realized that my stealing did matter, simply because of the principle. Even though the theft was worth less than nothing, it’s the fact that I purposely took someone else’s property that makes it wrong. Do I regret my thieving and criminal childhood? Definitely. It’s totally wrong to take someone else’s property, especially under my circumstances. It’s pretty fortunate that I only stole things of little value- imagine if I escalated my stealing spree to more valuable items like $20 bills or gallons of Nutella.

Regardless of my past, however, I think I’ve distanced myself from my stealing tendencies. My approach to stealing has evolved as I’ve grown and now I don’t find myself taking items as often as I once did. Maybe, in a decade or two, I’ll have progressed to actually giving things away- although I don’t think I’ll ever be able to mature to that level.