Sense before Self, Wisdom before Wants

I appreciate that there's a lot of pretty stuff in the stores. I'm partial to Talbot's and Ethan Allen myself.  I imagine, if I spent more time in the world looking at the pretty things out there, I might be drawn to shop til I drop, engage in a little 'retail therapy'.  Fortunately for me, I'm not.  I'm not out there and I'm not drawn in to the endless rounds of shopping.  Not even at Christmastide do I feel a need to be spending wildly, but that's just me.

I do wonder though, the extent to which the crazy 'shop, shop, shop' culture (including the 'shop it's good for the economy' nonsense), plays a role in the tendency of executives of all stripes to make illegal and immoral decisions.  Take for instance, PG County (Maryland's) own Jack Johnson.  It is alleged that Mr. Johnson has had a pay-to-play modus operandi in the county.  It is alleged that if one wanted to build a store, one had to offer tangible financial support to his administration (or to him personally).  It is alleged.

None of this is really surprising in a culture that deifies money and the things it can buy.  As I said, I too would love to spend more on pretty things, but at the end (or perhaps the beginning) of the day, when we replace integrity, honesty and decency with an ends-justify-the-means mindset, trouble surely will follow.  That's not news but clearly, it bears repeating.

As for Jack Johnson (a former state's attorney (the chief prosecutor for his state)) and his wife (herself a former attorney), neither of them even has plausible deniability to fall back upon.  Allegedly, Johnson was heard on a federal wiretap advising his wife to destroy a check in the amount of $100,000 and to hide $80k+ in cash on  her person, even as the FBI was knocking at the door.  Surely one or the other of them knew that they were on the wrong path, well before the FBI was at the door? 

So here's the memo: Jail ain't fun and most of those who land there don't generally return to their earlier lives untainted by the trip.  While Martha Stewart was able to move smoothly back into her empire, Mark Madoff (Bernard Madoff's son), who was never even acccused of any wrongdoing, was not so lucky.  Sometimes even the merest taint of impropriety is enough to completely derail a life.  That should be warning enough for the sensible.  Jack & Leslie Johnson clearly didn't get that memo.