We’re renting a house in Mérida, Mexico. The clothes dryer was busted. I pretty much knew what was wrong with it, and probably could have fixed it, but I’m not allowed to fix anything. I’m supposed to call the property manager and tell her what’s wrong, and she arranges to have it fixed. They don’t trust occupants to fix stuff.  It’s a hard and fast policy, in writing on the lease.

I can’t say I blame them. These days, the average person is capable of breaking things further, but not fixing much. In my case, it leads to entertaining conversations when the property manager, who is a little girl (I’m getting old), asks me amusing things like, “The clothes won’t dry? Are you sure it’s plugged in?” I once made guidance systems for NASA and the Department of Defense, and I learned to check if the accelerometer test bed was plugged in, so I felt like I had that type of eventuality covered, but I didn’t mention it. And BTW, it’s a gas dryer. She sent someone out to fix it.

The repairman came. He spoke no English. That’s common around here. The Yucatan is barely Mexico, never mind an ersatz suburb of the US. Many people still speak Mayan here along with their Spanish. Learning English is way down the list of things to do. My Spanish is rudimentary, but I could manage a greeting and to tell him where the dryer is located (Adelante, arriba!). He got to work.

There’s a giant rubber band on the back of the drum that had snapped. The fellow had to take the whole thing apart from the front, which was a PIA, but it was a simple fix once he could get at the problem. He was a thoroughgoing type of guy, and cleaned the whole apparatus, and removed the exhaust vent pipe, which is one of those accordion metal things, and cleaned out all the lint in that, too. He was working in our cuarto de lavado, a hot, cramped little room for laundry, cleaning supplies, a few termites, and the water heater. I gave him a Coke while he worked, which he treated like a winning lottery ticket. It’s 95 degrees every day, so I could see his point. When he was done, he left in a cloud of English encomium.

The next day, I noticed two US quarters on the shelf next to the dryer. They weren’t ours, we deal strictly in pesos here. They’re the residue of tourists past, people who forgot them in their pants pockets. The fellow who fixed the dryer found them inside the washing machine’s drain, or maybe the dryer’s exhaust while he was cleaning it, but would not take them, because they were not his.

Think of that. Fifty cents is real money to people around here, almost ten pesos. I can buy a loaf of bread from the panaderia next door for eight pesos, for example. Fifty cents is not like a penny in the street in Boston, one that no one can be bothered to pick up. But even though no one was looking, and the money was actually a motherless child, and no one would be the wiser, he would not take it.

I’d aver that I’m as honest as the next guy, but nowadays, that’s faint praise indeed. I’ve seen the “next guy” who’s abroad in the country of my birth, and he’s basically feral. The fear of being caught is the only stumbling block for about half the population of the United States. The other half isn’t even afraid of being caught anymore. The idea of not taking something because it doesn’t belong to you is totally squaresville, man. Flock cameras have mostly replaced the role of the conscience, and bodyworn police cameras cover the rest of the waterfront. For the vast majority of people in the US, there is no internal check on their behaviors, and precious few external checks, at least if you watch YouTube arrest videos right through to the end to see all the charges dropped.

He would not take them because they were not his. It’s that simple. I doubt he even hesitated over it. I meet a lot of people like him here. They are what they is, as we used to say in the vernacular. Their behavior is not a veneer. It goes all the way through.

As Chesterton said, “If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments.” The United States is now in the thrall of the ten thousand commandments, courtesy of the opinions of millions of Karens, with more on the way. But ten times ten thousand commandments will never be enough to make two quarters appear on the shelf in your laundry. Ten might.