Stopping the Insanity

It is said that the definition of insanity is, "Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results."

The other day as I was driving to the hospitals in Belleville, Illinois, I stopped at a light and, as I glanced across the lanes of traffic, a young lady who was also waiting at the light in another lane opened her window and threw out a wad of papers. I'm not talking about a chewing gum wrapper, I'm talking about standard sheets of paper, wadded up and unattached to each other. Blithely she rolled her window up and drove away, the papers scattering in the wind whirling through the intersection.

I sat transfixed, hardly believing what I had seen, when the light turned green and traffic, myself included, moved on. In my rearview mirror I watched the papers continue to scatter in the hustle and bustle of the daily grind and wondered aloud, 'Is it a wonder we are where we are?'

Now I realize that this young lady (a term I am using very loosely here) does not speak or act for all of society yet, hers is a voice, hers is an action, an indicator of assumed collective moral acceptability. It is as if she looked around at all of us at that intersection and proclaimed, 'My trash is your trash.'

Have I ever done stupid things, unthinking things before? Absolutely! There are moments of my life and behaviors I would dearly love to be able to 're-do'. Have I ever 'dumped the trash of my life in a public setting and just drove away' hoping someone else would take care of it? Absolutely. Shame-faced, absolutely. Still, there was something about this person's demeanor which caught me and stays with me even today: She didn't care. She flat-out didn't care who saw her, where her trash went, or what the ramifications on others would be. She didn't care . . . and you could see it in her face. She had other places to be, other things to do, bigger responsibilities to bear. Trash wasn't in her job description.

The definition of insanity is, "Doing the same thing over and over again, expecting the same results."

It would be insane of me to expect this young lady to change. Some would say it would be insane of me to have stopped in the middle of traffic and picked up the paper and, honestly, I wish I had, because that may be the only way to stop the insanity. We have to change the behavior and, if changing the behavior of others is not realistically possible, we have to at least change our own behavior. Isn't that what the story of the Good Samaritan is all about? One person changed what everyone else said was alright to do then, all of a sudden, a new paradigm of understanding was born. Heaven broke in, even if only for a moment.

I'm feeling ready to stop some insanity and let heaven break in. How about you?