Busy Bodies
I really dislike busy bodies, and my neighbourhood is full of them. Today I was walking along the shoreline, and happened upon a sixty-ish woman remonstrate with a mother and her young son. The older woman was telling the mother that her son shouldn’t be–get this–tossing rocks into the water. Her argument seemed to be that the rocks were artificially dumped there as part of the retaining wall.
I walked past, shaking my head. The mother dismissed the woman, and so the older woman was walking behind me. For a minute, I was torn between my urge to tell this woman off and to keep my counsel. I choose the former and turned around. The following conversation ensued (edited to make me sound more articulate):
ME: Excuse me, I overheard your conversation with that woman.
WOMAN: Yes.
ME: Well, those rocks are eventually going to be moved by the tide anyway.
WOMAN: But if everyone did that, those rocks would be gone.
ME: How many people do you see throwing rocks in the water? I see one small boy. Even if he did that every day, and his ten friends did it too, I don’t think that would have a meaningful impact on our taxes, do you?
WOMAN: It’s like the other day, this guy let his two dogs crap by those bushes and didn’t clean it up.
ME: The difference there is that that’s against the law. Throwing rocks in the water isn’t. If you want to make that against the law, I suggest you lobby your city councilor. It’s not for us to make rules about what people can and can’t do.
WOMAN: Well, I guess that’s why everything’s going to hell.
ME: I guess so.
With that, she walked off. I know that Polonius advises us to ‘give every man thy ear, but few thy voice’, but I couldn’t resist. If nothing else, I didn’t want the kid to be chastised for something that wasn’t wrong.
KevinG 
Laree 
Ms. X