What we have here is a failure to communicate
People like to talk about good ol' American values. Or sigh and reminisce about the good days long past. How people used to be wholesome and brimming with compassion and goodwill. These values are often imagined when we speak of family farmers in the Midwest. Let me tell you: It's all crap.
Wholesome Midwestern Protestant values led my father and his siblings and my grandmother (!) to steal from their neighbors on a recurring basis. I shit you not.
Here was the deal:
My father grew up on a South Dakota dairy farm. Their next-door neighbors — which, incidentally, were a mile up the road — had some apple trees on their property. (It might've been another fruit, but I can't imagine what could survive the winters.) The problem was, the neighbors let the fruit ripen, rot, and fall to the earth. They didn't eat any of it.
For my grandmother, this was maddening. Why? Protestant American values: Thou shalt not waste. After watching all them good baking apples decay on the ground year after year, she decided to do something about it. When the apples were ripe, she woke up all the kids — nine total — and they all bundled up and trudged through the midnight dark (pitch dark; no streetlights) to the neighbors', where they picked the trees clean. The next morning, she'd start baking pies and canning the rest. My grandmother had Mason jars of fruits and vegetables the way you have files on your hard drive.
Once, during an annual pilfering, one of the siblings was moving around a small tree and unknowingly stretched a limb with her. When she moved away, it snapped like a switch and cracked into the side of my father's head. He began to cry (he was quite young) and my grandmother rushed to clasp her hands over his mouth. The house was not far, but fortunately no one inside woke up. Kind of like those high-tension scenes in action movies, right? Where the hero has to cross the armed room in silence and one of his/her comic flunkies stumbles and yells "Murdock, I'm hit!"?
Two obvious questions come out of this:
One. Why didn't my grandmother simply ask the neighbors for their apples? Easy: American Protestant values. To ask might seem to confer a negative value judgment on how they lead their lives. Thievery is better than embarrassment.
Two. Didn't they ever notice their trees were picked clean? Again: American Protestant values. If they asked my grandmother about it, it might seem accusatory. Better to be robbed than to confront.
The good ol' days, when pickpockets were concerned about your welfare and burglars simply wanted to avoid embarrassing you.
