Mid-morning on Sunday, on the front porch of a rural church in the middle of an almost-wilderness in eastern Texas, many square miles of forest with no paved road cutting through. It was a beautiful spring morning, no breeze, no clouds, totally clear sky.
As I talked with the county judge, directly in front of us, maybe 1 mile distant, a slim, white, straight plume of smoke rose up, and up, and up.
"What's that?" I said.
"What?" said the judge.
"There" I pointed.
"I don't see anything, preacher, and you don't either."
Obviously it was a still, a maker of moonshine, long after most folks presumed illegal whiskey had disappeared years before. Not so.
Legal? No. Was anyone going to pursue it? No. It was local, probably everyone known by name, and that plume would rise like that on most any clear day, for a long future.
Listen to conversations sometimes. Bad things that are OUR things are often laughed off`. Bad things that are someone ELSE'S things are roundly condemned. "Home Game" is not just a sports thing, you know.
And those little exceptions that all of us know about can become big problems for a tight population. It works in the country, sometimes, but in the population density of a crowded city, not so well.
There's a big difference between doing what's right and doing what one can get away with.
Worth pondering in my own choices. Maybe yours.
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