Doing the Right Thing

After we had left Steinhart Aquarium yesterday, my friends and I were talking about the bad parents at the aquarium -- the ones who didn't know how to scold their children for bad behavior or who insisted on condescendingly calling every fish in sight "Nemo" or jabbering on about adult matters as if children really cared, such as this one that I overheard:
Parent: "Oh, look, it's a flounder! Jim's dad goes fishing for those every year."

Child: "Did he put it in his aquarium at home?"

Parent: "No, he cooked it and ate it."

This latest story has nothing to do with aquariums or fish, but rather, about a camera and a trip to Hawaii. Judith is a blogger who went on a trip to Hawaii and lost her digital camera, so she started a blog to recreate her photos from pictures of Hawaii taken by other people on Flickr. She wrote on Saturday:
"I hadn't posted here in a while, because just after the last post, I got a call from an excited park ranger in Hawaii that "a nice Canadian couple reported that they found your camera!" She gave me their name and number, and I eagerly called to reclaim my camera.

"Hello," I said, when I reached the woman who had reported the camera found, "I got your number from the park ranger, it seems you have my camera?"


We discussed the specifics of the camera, the brown pouch it was in, the spare battery and memory card, the yellow rubberband around the camera. It was clear it was my camera, and I was thrilled.


"Well," she said, "we have a bit of a situation. You see, my nine year old son found your camera, and we wanted to show him to do the right thing, so we called, but now he's been using it for a week and he really loves it and we can't bear to take it from him."


I listened, not sure where she was going with this.


"And he was recently diagnosed with diabetes, and he's now convinced he has bad luck, and finding the camera was good luck, and so we can't tell him that he has to give it up. Also we had to spend a lot of money to get a charger and a memory card."


It started to dawn on me that she had no intention of returning the camera.

Judith doesn't get her camera or her memory cards back from them. Instead she gets some CDs in the mail of her photos.
Contrast this with what I witnessed yesterday at the aquarium with an 8-year old boy at the aquarium gift shop, a boy finds a ten dollar bill and asks the people around him if they dropped it. Everyone says it's not theirs, and the Mom says "Let's take it to lost and found". It renewed my faith in humanity if only for a short while -- not just because the child "did the right thing" but everyone else around did as well.

And then I wake up, I find this story on the net, and I am cynical once again about the future of society.