the cop in your head

if only there were enough do-gooder capes for such a nauseating lack of self-awareness & self-righteous assumptions that such desperation will never become such good good citizens.

when upon making your way through the grocery store

you noticed a wo/man sliding a loaf of bread or a bottle of water,

some food stuff, under their coat, and

making their way past the register to the door,

without paying &

inside, the loud bell

chimes---

all that you learned during your conditioning

through schooling to be a good citizen,

through church to get your gold stars in “heaven,”

through gaining adultship amidst the rest of

the ba ba ba sheep in the

kingdom of empire,

has isolated in you one idea that if you don’t shout to

someone in charge,

that person is gonna get away with something that

you have not---

there is no thought in your head that

someone who steals food may be in dire straits that

you yourself have never had to consider

(and that may never matter anyway, because the

“law” trumps all---right?) &

there is no thought in your head that the mental capacity to

steal something of substance in need

might reveal a deficiency, be it mental or otherwise,

which might not even be satisfied in such a manner,

or that the whole event reveals so much more about the

warped context of society as a whole

(where one without such substance has to steal it to begin with)---

no,

the cop in your head

(which tells you that if you don’t scream “thief!” in order to get this person

the ultimate consequence for their actions, then your whole little world will crumble away) dominates,

the cop in your head wins out &

in letting it,

you sound the alarm to the person in charge

like a good little boy/girl &

this person, whose life was already worse than yours to begin with,

gets thrown into the garbage, once again &

you go on about your day

thinking that you have done a great deed,

thinking that you & you alone have saved the precious moral fabric of the world in which you live &

that because said person is going to

“get theirs,”

that you have saved it all from happening again.