Things That Go Hmmm - Zap!

My wife told me a funny story yesterday.

Her grandparents lived on a small farm in Alabama for many years. This wasn’t a huge farm; this was a tiny family farm that managed to feed the family and allow them to work really hard in order to barely keep in the black.

There were truckloads of Mexican migrant workers who came to neighboring, much larger farms to pick potatoes and pecans, etc. Somehow a group of migrant workers discovered that the electric fence surrounding Granny’s farm was off for part of the day. They would come in small groups to steal firewood from the few cords of wood Granny had managed to store up.

One day Granny saw them approaching the fence and decided to teach them a little lesson. When the younger ones grabbed the fence to climb over she turned on the electricity and gave them a healthy shock. The amusing part was that Granny would turn off the fence when the older ones climbed over, so that a little comedy routine ensued where the elders would tell the young-uns (in Spanish) “the fence is off, what is wrong with you? Just climb on over, lazybones.” The young-uns would respond “No, no, I’m SERIOUS, the fence is electric and it shocked me.” This would be followed by more scolding and more whining. All the while, Granny would be shocking the little ones and letting the older ones go over just fine. Call it a lesson plus a little psychological warfare.

A couple weeks, and several similar visits later, the migrant workers decided it was easier to get their wood elsewhere and Granny’s wood was safe.

So after my wife told me this story, which I did find funny, I asked her “Well, you know what they wanted the wood for, right?”

“Sure, to stay warm.”

“Isn’t that a little sad?” I responded.

“Yeah, but my Granny worked and scraped for everything they had and stealing is wrong!”

And I had to agree. Stealing is wrong.

But what would I do? I guess I might approach them as they crossed my fence and suggest that I worked hard for the wood and maybe offer them some that particular day but encourage them to stay off of my land afterward. Would it have worked? Dunno. Probably not. My Spanish is muy poquito. I might be able to tell them to stop and ask them where I could find the bathroom. I could also ask them for two more beers, please (although I don’t drink, so that’s sort of useless).

Granny could have shocked them all. Granny could have approached them with a gun. Granny could have somehow trapped the woodpile. This was all before one would take on huge liability for injuring a trespasser. Granny could have done so much worse. I’m not suggesting that Granny was doing anything but protecting her well-earned resources from being stolen.

But stealing wood to keep warm… sheesh. Maybe I like “Les Miserable” a little too much. The hero in that story was on the run for stealing a loaf of bread so his family could eat. Okay, actually he was on the run because he didn’t sign up on the Bread Offenders Registry when he got out of jail.

Maybe I’m too liberal but I hear Granny’s story and think “poor farm workers.”

Then again, if I came home from work and described to my wife this story:

A man, a woman, their two year old son, and their dog were driving on the BlahbittyBlah Highway northbound and a drunk teenager who was watch a DVD while driving crossed the center line and hit them, killing the man and the woman and seriously injuring the child.

My wife’s first words would be “was the dog okay?”

We all have our own filters, through which we see the parts of the world that interest us.