Many Happy non-Returns
In the crucible of moral formation, it is the small, every day tests of virtue where growth, or impairment, occurs. These tests confront us in the ordinary course of our lives, and if we are inattentive, we can miss them. We’re not referring to the easily resolved moral issues of our day — like unfriending your mother-in-law on Facebook after she continues posting the financial and athletic exploits of your wife’s physically chiseled, Bugatti-driving former boyfriend (right) versus un-friending your cousin, Sean, who now identifies as Shauna after gender reassignment surgery, and has married an ISIS fighter and moved to Iraq to fight American imperialists (wrong). Or using single-ply bath tissue that skimps on comfort for the sake of fewer clogs (right), or luxuriating in double-ply softness, causing clogging, endless flushing, and excessive water consumption (wrong). These are all ethical no-brainers requiring little if any reflection, much less angst. 
To the opposite extreme is the seemingly mundane dilemma of whether to return shopping carts to the cart corrals when visiting grocery stores, big box stores, and the like. In the past, we dutifully returned carts, while basking in the glow of our reflected glory shining in the faces of admiring observers. (Be assured that we only detected this veneration due to our keen peripheral vision.) And, if while returning our carts, we encountered a store employee collecting stray carts due to other shoppers’ callousness, we humbly nodded, embarrassed by the effusive thanks. Yes, we’d restored his or her faith in humanity, but our stoic code rejects all such adulatory recognition.
However, one evening, after sparing another tired, harried, and dispirited collector from retrieving yet another cart, our highly sensitive conscience was afflicted with doubt. What if our selflessness was unintentionally preventing a young and ambitious teen — or worse, a dejected and otherwise unemployable senior — from earning a position in the promising field of cart collection?
Over the course of many sleepless nights, we confronted the undeniable economics: our intervention in the cart return business incontrovertibly lowered demand for cart returners. And our selfless works only benefited ruthless titans of commerce — Target, Costco, Walmart, Home Depot, and so on, at the expense of folks just trying to survive in this breakneck world of ours.The anguished cries of prospective cart jockeys haunted our every waking hour.
These new insights shattered our previous complacency and challenged our natural instinct to not only return carts, but also to re-rack clothes we’d tried on at department stores; to restore store displays we’d knocked over; and to “pre-clean” hotel rooms we’d left in disastrous states. In short, our moral universe had been unalterably rocked. 
Finally, the cold, harsh economic reality prevailed. We could no longer in good conscience return carts to corrals — not merely for the sake of desperate young men supporting expensive video game habits, but also for the sake of car dent removal workers whose livelihood depended on stray carts careening into pristine clear coat finishes. Undeniably, cart returns by shoppers had all along been morally unjustifiable.
Ironically, our first cart return opportunity after this epiphany arose on an evening that gravely tested our steely resolve. At Costco that night, a fierce squall viciously pelted shoppers with sleet and hail, lifting carriers of sturdy golf umbrellas Mary Poppins-like into the stratosphere. The 60-70 mile winds buffeted carts, at times propelling them off four wheels and crashing into the hoods of expensive German automobiles. Chaos reigned in the lot as we unloaded our cart filled with single-ply bath tissue, organic chocolate milk, and fair trade coffee.
After unloading, we instinctively pointed and began moving our cart toward the corral. Lacking appropriate headgear, waterproof apparel, rubberized footwear, or a life raft, we were prepared to pay the ultimate price to make the return. But a vision suddenly appeared in our minds of a disconsolate teen whose cart-collecting aspirations were being crushed by well-intentioned but uninformed shoppers. Courageously, we re-directed our cart, gathered ourselves, and mightily pushed it toward a large, black SUV. After impressively scraping and denting the SUV’s rear quarter panel, the cart rebounded into the knees of an unsuspecting elderly Costco patron, toppling him head first into the pavement, his shrill screams of pain heard above even the howling winds.
We would have rushed to his aid, except (thankfully) for our monk-like devotion to the cause. The geezer’s lawsuit, settled in the tens of millions of dollars, has taught Costco the importance of adequately staffing their cart-collection operation, and freed dozens, if not hundreds, of aspiring cart collectors from stasis and despair.
Sadly, our victories on behalf of the oppressed have largely gone unnoticed and unappreciated. Not that we care. We’ll continue to strategically position our emptied carts where they’re of the greatest benefit: in-between and alongside newer and even well-kept older cars. Meanwhile, we stoically disregard the disdainful looks of other shoppers, and their presumed attitudes of superiority. We trust that our example will eventually pierce their misplaced moral vanity; if not this year, we pray in the years and even decades ahead.
Because we have a dream — a dream that, one day, the grave injustice against unemployed cart collectors and automotive dent repairmen will end. So we hold onto this great hope, while letting our empty carts roll down like a river and never-ending stream into vast seas of parked cars across this blighted land of ours.
And, this holiday season, we implore all to remember that no cart collector will be left behind if we’ll all sacrificially leave our carts behind.
Merry Christmas.
