Disclaimer by the Editorial Board: The following story, No Good Deed… is a work of fiction by Billy Lee. Events and persons depicted in the story exist only in the imagination of the writer and have no connection to living persons or actual events.
The old woman ahead of me in the checkout lane at the grocery sat in a battery-operated three-wheeler and struggled to move her purse off her wrist into the front basket. She couldn’t do it and gave up. She was grossly overweight; she couldn’t maneuver — her fat arms were black and blue right down to her fingernails. Diabetes, I thought.
I wondered if I should help, but she soon stopped and let the purse dangle where it was, on her wrist. It was a bad angle. It would be awkward for me to reach for it; and besides, it was her purse, a personal item she might try to defend. It was a good bet she fought this fight every time she shopped. No big deal. Let it go.
It was her own cart that she sat in, from the looks of it. She probably had used it for years. Held together by duct tape and bubble gum, it was dirty; a yellowed eggnog color; depressing to look at.
The cashier at the register — a black college-aged girl — finished the tally; the old woman sitting in the beat-up cart fumbled unsuccessfully to open her purse; the line of shoppers behind us continued to grow. It was busy. It was Christmas. I was in a hurry. What the heck… I reached over to the card reader and inserted my card. I’ll get this, I said. Merry Christmas.
The old lady looked up at me and said, thank you.
You look like you have enough to worry about, I said, beaming. We’ll make it one less thing.
Yes, she said. I worry about so many things these days. She fell silent and looked down. Something drippy fell from her mottled face into her lap. The eyes of the young black woman working the cash-register grew large and began to sparkle from tears, which she tried to hold back.
She would tell me later she had just immigrated from Ghana, Africa. She has stories, that girl, I would think to myself. The African regained her composure and gathered the old lady’s items.
As the cashier and myself exchanged a sympathetic look, the old woman with the black and blue arms and drippy face reached for a button on her cart and sped away. She didn’t remember to collect her receipt. I don’t think she felt embarrassed. Maybe she thought I might change my mind; make her pay for her own groceries, or something.
The cashier rang up my stuff. It was all good. I started to get that warm glow one gets when they’ve done something for someone, especially a stranger.
A melodic accent from somewhere out of Africa interrupted my reverie, Oh, look! Here is a bag of things. Are they yours? I think I forgot to give them to that person.
We checked the contents against the old woman’s receipt. Yup, they weren’t mine.
The cashier grabbed the bag and ran down the long aisle of the store to search for an old woman driving a beat-up mobility scooter with a missing bag of groceries. The folks in line behind me started to stir. A few threw unfriendly looks in my direction. My warm feeling turned to heat, then dread.
The cashier returned; she hadn’t found the customer. Since I had the receipt, I decided to take the groceries. If the old lady returned, she would be unable to convince anyone the groceries were hers, I reasoned.
I began to worry. It was Christmas. Undercover cops — temporaries with little training or empathy — lurked pretty much everywhere. They loved to patrol the parking lots, someone once told me.
What if store security decided to stop the old lady in the busy lot? What if they intercepted her before she could rendezvous with whoever was driving her home? Maybe she lived alone nearby, and there was no one to escort her. Minus the receipt, they might arrest her for shoplifting.
They might already have her in a little room somewhere, hidden from the public, to interrogate her. That’s why we couldn’t find her. I loosened my collar as my mind began to race. I felt sweat bead on the top of my head.
She would notice — under the intense pressure of questioning — one bag of groceries was missing. And she couldn’t produce the receipt. He took it, she’d realize. It was the old man! I could hear her screaming. She was cursing me — the old codger who had stood behind her and had the audacity to jump into her business for no good reason.
Of course she had the money to pay for everything, she screamed at the SWAT team as they held her down; as they restrained her. Of course she did. She didn’t need that smelly stranger’s credit card. And he stole a bag of her groceries! Arrest him! It was he, the grey-beard, who robbed her; it was he who took her receipt; it was he who confused her — and the cashier! He got her arrested. It was he, he, he — an old FART! — not her!
I imagined her anguish. By now she must realize that she would spend Christmas in prison; behind bars; isolated; alone; cold; away from family and a warm fire in the hearth — for I just knew she had no money for lawyers or bail.
I thought I could hear her weeping. I could hear her, but I would never be able to find her. No one else could hear her cries for mercy, no one would ever step forward to defend her and confirm her story. Take her out of here, I heard the arresting officer boom. Thief!
My parting words to the cashier were short enough. I hurried to my car and drove out of the busy parking lot, quickly, furtively. I cast a side-long glance into my rear-view mirror. No flashing lights. No siren. An old red van with a tree tied on top pulled up behind me.
It was Christmas; the most wonderful time of the year.
In 1949, almost a year after I was born, the latest edition of the 30 volume Encyclopedia Americana hit the streets of America. The collection of big books was the first multi-volume encyclopedia sold in the United States, starting way back in 1829. Each year it grew in size, sometimes adding new volumes to cover more subjects. By 1949, it was truly comprehensive.
I own a complete set of the 1949 edition, which my wife’s dad passed on to me after his death a few years ago. By all accounts, the volumes were a sensation when first published. Not only were they successfully sold door to door throughout the United States, but libraries everywhere stocked them on their shelves for scholars and the public alike to explore and absorb.
1949 was a few short years after the end of World War II. Colleges overflowed with legions of returning GIs who studied for free courtesy of the recently passed GI Bill. The Encyclopedia Americanabecame a beacon of knowledge and enlightenment for hundreds of thousands of optimistic Americans who were ramping up their skills to conquer the ignorance and backwardness of a world they knew all too well from their recent exposure to the wars overseas.
After perusing these volumes during the past few years, I have been struck by how much we knew in 1949, and by how much we thought we knew but didn’t. I was dumbfounded by racist patterns of thinking, which seemed to permeate the collection. It came as a complete surprise. Modern people could be excused for thinking that Hitler himself wrote some of the articles, I thought to myself.
People have said that racism is the original sin of America; that we have never come to terms with the bad things we did (and continue to do), because some of our European forefathers — scientists even — believed that Africans were medically degenerate.
Our country enslaved blacks because ostensibly responsible people told our ancestors that Negroes were animals, like lions or tigers. Of course it was OK to work them like pack-animals, some thought. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all. Besides, slavery was in the Bible.
After slavery ended, whites continued to segregate the races. And they still do.
Look at Florida if you don’t believe it. In the State of Florida, segregation is a way of life. Americans, some among us, seem to be oblivious to the evil of our actions and unaware of the demonic origin of many of our ideas about what is true and what is right.
We tend to repeat lies that hurt whole classes of people; lies that help no one but drive to despair and even suicide folks like South American immigrants, gays and, yes, Middle Eastern refugees who struggle to get by in a society that seems to value only excellence and perfection, money and power, symmetry and form, orthodoxy and moral rectitude.
We look down on, shun, and isolate authentic human beings who typically possess attributes we don’t admire like humility, lowliness, incompetence, average intelligence, awkward manners, social inadequacy, clumsiness, unreliable physical ability, psychological disabilities, ugliness, poor hygiene, ravaged skin, lack of hair, too much hair, unpleasant smells, thinness, fatness, and on and on.
We condemn millions to long prison terms who have done nothing more than act like fools; who have made mistakes, which with a little maturity and wisdom gained in the fresh air of freedom they might not ever make again.
Many readers can probably think of many undesirable attributes of human beings they find repulsive and would repress with long prison terms if only they could. It’s a desire best left unfulfilled.
Most are not permitted beyond these gates. They aren’t worthy.
Our inability to accept and live next to people who have less money, less education, different physical traits; who might be less attractive and less polished; who may not understand the world as we do; who are different in some way we find compelling is destroying our humanity; our ability to love and accept others.
Think about it.
We wreck any chance for happiness; any sense of well-being for tens of millions of ordinary people — probably hundreds of millions — who, it turns out, have very few advantages in this life of dog-eat-dog competition; it’s a fight that some lack the temperament to endure. Bigotry is demoralizing for those bullied by it; it is diminishing our country and our world.
We seem unable to even look at people with physical disabilities and handicaps; the blind; the deaf; the burned; the paraplegic; the paralyzed, the mentally incapacitated, the depressed, the hyperactive and the socially fearful.
Many Americans are hiding themselves behind gates, guard shacks, and walls to avoid facing the simple truth that people are diverse; God demands that we accept and respect everyone, because each person — even those who are unattractive and ungrateful in our own morally-damaged sight — are made from the stuff of God Himself and are in the reality we shun truly beautiful and deserving of respect and deference.
Jesus said that God loves the wicked. He loves people who are weak and powerless and undesirable. How can we do less?
Well… one reason is that we are degenerate, everyone of us, whether we are able to see the ugly truth or not. The most admirable person falls short of God’s glory.
Who believes it’s true?
Anyway, I thought that these two entries from the 1949 Encyclopedia Americana, reprinted below in their brutal original version, might help open the eyes of folks who are blind to the cesspool of ideas which have corrupted the spirits of our country; which have driven some people to avoid, ostracize, exclude, and kill people they think are unworthy to enjoy the advantages and privileges they demand for themselves.
These tombs of hate from our past sat on bookshelves and in libraries where they were read for many decades after their publication. Hatred poured forth not only from encyclopedias like the Americana, but from all forms of media and public discourse, it turns out.
The nasty rhetoric of race, exclusion, and the exaggerated elevation of our elites into a pantheon of god-like celebrities has poisoned our minds and our souls; it continues to poison our churches and schools; the military and our public institutions. It’s painfully evident in the rabid venom-spewing aspirants we find in our politics today who I won’t name.
Why demean a good essay by recognizing deplorable people? The president is a public celebrity who rose to power on an ocean tide of hatred. I guess it does no harm to call him out.
People claim they mean well and are doing God’s will, but golly-gee, someone has to say it (it might as well be me): the movement to transfer children from public schools into homeschooling; the stampede to place civilians armed with concealed weapons into churches and schools; the attempts to scare women out of exercising their constitutionally protected freedom to make healthcare choices involving their bodies; fire bombing healthcare clinics that help the poor; intimidating writers like myself who publish views unpopular with morons — all are symptomatic of a country that has become less free, more fascist, less brave — certainly less accepting, less tolerant, less nurturing, and less forgiving.
America is a mean-spirited place for many people. Even upscale people in high places are afraid to speak their minds plainly out of fear for the faceless billionaires who pull their strings and determine their futures. Look at all the safe-talk on television. Some people call it political correctness. What does that term mean?
It means people’s careers get ruined if they speak about certain subjects in a frank and unconventional way. When was the last time you heard a celebrity advocate for something as innocuous as a progressive income tax? Shorter prison sentences? Maximum incomes? Estate size limits? Limits on inherited wealth?
What accelerates and widens inequality can’t be right.
Our celebrities are held in-check by tight leashes. And it isn’t the public holding the leashes. To remain in the spotlight, celebrities must wear muzzles. Does anyone think they are going to complain?
Try to remember the names of celebrities who said something controversial and were never heard from again. You might remember their faces, maybe even some of the shows they were on. Few remember their names, more likely than not. They dropped off the face of the earth. They disappeared. The list is long, it really is.
I write about forbidden subjects all the time, but I’m not a celebrity. No one controls me, not since I resigned my memberships in certain organizations and work for free. But the public doesn’t read my blog. And, yes, some subjects are off-limits even for writers like me who want to believe they are free.
I don’t write about Israel or North Korea or drug cartels; I don’t bad-mouth artists; I don’t condemn creative people, because people with unusual points of view who have talent are fragile and easily frightened to silence; money and fame drive people into isolation bubbles. I don’t publish articles about my sexuality. I tried once; it didn’t turn out well.
Sometimes I break my own rules, it’s true. But let’s get back on message.
I don’t feel like I’m overstating. Below are two examples of a vicious way of thinking, which was mainstream in the decades following 1949. Today in 2015 some folks continue to embrace crazy reasoning. Who will exorcise the evil winds that freeze-dry hearts to raging cold?
Tolerance isn’t enough. It’s uncommitted and indifferent.
Embracing outcasts in love is the way.
It’s not possible to embrace the marginalized in love when advantaged people segregate themselves by income, class, and race. No one can help when they push aside those who don’t think like them or look like them or act like them. No one who believes that diversity is a plague to be avoided can help desperados who need a hand up.
Think about it.
Who can save their children and grand-children when they lack the courage to confront the billionaires who built the gilded cell-block we call America? Billionaires built prison-America to protect themselves from us.
Here’s the problem. Most folks don’t know the names of the billionaires who rule them. Who can reason with the wealthy? Who can find them?
The truth is, they find us, usually when they need someone like a soldier to fight to protect their property or a worker who will add value to their estates by performing tasks for low wages.
The problem is: they don’t love us. Otherwise they would live in the world where we live, but they don’t. Then again, they might allow us to live in their world, where the water in their pools is blue and clean and the sun is warm. But they won’t do that either.
Maybe someday. Someday maybe if they change, they will. They will unlock the gates. They will throw away the keys. They will let us in.
On that day we will become one people, one nation, indivisible, under God.
While we wait, we change ourselves. We learn to live unafraid. We learn to share our advantages. We teach ourselves to love the unloved.
What else is there?
Billy Lee
[The following are excerpts from the 1949 edition of The Encyclopedia Americana. Billy Lee does not endorse any of it. The Editorial Board.]
DEGENERACY. Unfavorable environment is now generally recognized as the chief cause of the failure of individuals to attain the physical, mental, and moral norm of the race. In certain individuals, however, a defective constitution may predispose them toward an inadequate development of mental, and especially moral, qualities. Such individuals are known as degenerates.
In many such cases the basis of degeneracy is a lesion of the nervous system or of the sense organs. Congenital blindness and deafness can result in idiocy unless early measures are taken. However, the fundamental defects may be obscure and inaccessible to the pathological anatomist of the present day. The neuro-sensory defects are often, but not always, accompanied by malformations of a more conspicuous character, known as stigmata.
These include various distortions of the external ear, facial asymmetry, very early or very late closure of the cranial sutures, polydactylism and other digital anomalies and various signs of imperfect or abnormal development. Individual stigmata may be present in a person of normal mental and moral make-up, but the concurrence of a considerable number of stigmata is a fairly good sign of degeneracy.
The forms assumed by degeneracy are very various. The mental defect varies from utter idiocy, where the patient is unable to protect himself from immediate physical danger, through imbecility, where he is still incapable of carrying out the daily processes of dressing and undressing, washing, etc., to the various grades of feeble-mindedness, in which he is able to satisfy all his immediate personal needs, but cannot earn an independent livelihood nor associate with his fellows on equal terms.
The causes of degeneracy are manifold. The racial poisons of alcohol, drugs and venereal diseases are responsible for a large proportion of the cases, though in many cases alcoholism and drug habits may be symptoms rather than causes of degeneracy. Any factor which enfeebles the mother — poverty, illness or the like — may injure the mental and moral constitution of the child as well as its physical constitution. However, the most important cause of degeneracy is in all probability the inherent inferiority of the stock.
That certain forms of degeneracy exhibit a pedigree conforming to the Mendelian law is now an established fact. This hereditary quality of degeneracy, together with the fact that degenerates are often likely to have many children, owing to their immorality, makes the problem of degeneracy a most serious one.
The so-called Jukes family cost the taxpayers of New York State millions of dollars in the course of the 19th century. For this reason many States have enacted laws making it legal in certain cases to perform on degenerates operations designed to prevent their propagating their kind.
See ALCOHOLISM; CRIMINOLOGY; DEGENERATION; EUGENICS; FEEBLE-MINDEDNESS; IDIOCY; INSANITY; PAUPERISM.
Bibliography. — Gillin, J.L., Poverty and Delinquency (New York 1926) ; Slawson, J., Delinquent Boy (Boston 1926) ; Glueck, S. S. and E., Five Hundred Delinquent Women (New York 1934) ; Chassell, C. R., Relation Between Morality and Intellect (New York 1935) ; Lunden, W. A., Juvenile Delinquency (Pittsburg 1936) ; Burt, C. L., Subnormal Mind (New York 1937) ; Karpman, B., Case Studies in the Psychopathology of Crime (Washington 1944).
DEGENERATION —a work of Max Nordau (1895), which aimed at a scientific criticism of those degenerates not upon the acknowledged lists of the criminal classes. Degenerates, asserted Nordau, are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists.
These, however, manifest the same mental characteristics, and for the most part the same somatic features, as the members of the above-mentioned anthropological family, who satisfy their unhealthy impulses with the knife of the assassin or the bomb of the dynamiter, instead of with pen and pencil….
Now I have undertaken the work of investigating the tendencies of the fashions in art and literature; of proving that they have their source in the degeneracy of their authors, and that the enthusiasm of their admirers is for manifestations of more or less pronounced moral insanity and dementia.
One word best describes my reaction to the above entries from the 1949 Encyclopedia Americana: Yikes!
UPDATE: 26 September 2019:Edward Snowden’s full interview with Brian Williams of MSNBC.
UPDATE: 13 June 2016:Edward Snowden’s HBO interview.Snowden discusses some of the technologies of surveillance used by civilians and governments today and warns about the future.
UPDATE: 7 August 2014:MIT researchers reveal new process to recover audio from ”silent” video.
UPDATE: 13 June 2020: Research engineers in Israel are now able to reconstruct conversations by recording light changes in a room induced by vibrating light sources like light bulbs.
The caretakers of both private and public spaces have free reign to watch everything people do.
It amazes me to read and watch stories in the press about people who commit brazen crimes in front of surveillance cameras. It seems many people have yet to get the message: in America, the caretakers of both private and public spaces have free reign to watch and record everything people do.
It’s not only dedicated cameras that lock on a face at a thousand yards, zoom, and switch to hi-resolution — something I noticed in the offices of a local college and received an explanation for by a proud employee.
It’s also directional microphones, smart contact lenses with embedded cameras, invasive computer monitoring (including unwelcome video and audio takeovers of computers, cell phones, iPads, and even game consoles) and sophisticated data collection and analysis through the acquisition of land-line records and receipts for purchases and recreational activities.
Even our automobiles — through technologies like On-Star, satellite radio, hidden event data recorders (black-box technology), and GPS — provide easy access to anyone who decides to observe us.
And I’m not talking about the federal government. Having grown up in an NSA family, I’m sensitive, somewhat, to government spying on civilians.
Perhaps things have changed, and no one told me, but I learned as a kid that unless you are a terrorist (when I was young, targets had to be communist), people have little to fear from federal surveillance, because it operates under a meticulous set of safeguards and protections of our civil liberties — at least as long as we are physically located inside the United States.
That doesn’t mean the Feds don’t watch and listen. It means they don’t act against individuals based on what they learn.
Right now, drones are not used much by private groups to spy on people. With new regulations, this kind of surveillance by private companies and public corporations could become commonplace.
No such safeguards exist in the private sector. What I’m referring to is surveillance by private citizens, business owners, church and other civic leaders and state officials, like local politicians and the local police. Surveillance by local groups and private individuals make them, sometimes, even more powerful and influential than the federal government itself — at least inside the United States — because they are free to act against private citizens based on what they learn from eavesdropping.
This surveillance is completely out of control and has dramatically shifted the balance of power away from average citizens who try to exercise their freedoms under the Constitution. Surveillance is often portrayed as passive; nobody reviews the audio/video/data records unless a crime is committed that requires a review.
The argument obfuscates the hard fact that the wealthy and the powerful — both groups and individuals — through the mechanism of a pernicious surveillance — are currently maximizing and protecting their already enormous advantages by getting a heads-up on suspect individuals and groups who they think may plan to challenge them.
Added November 24 2025… the EDITORS
Many average people don’t believe they are out-foxed and out-gunned, because they’ve never challenged anyone powerful. Take my word for it. Though not often, the truth is I have challenged some powerful people a few times in my life. In every case I had to back down, either to protect those I love or myself.
In one situation, my physical safety was threatened by a Cadillac driving thug sent from a well-known company that advertised on television. He could not have found me if he didn’t have me under surveillance. He got my attention and forced me to rethink about in what kind of country I was living.
But until recently, the powerful haven’t been able to inject themselves into our public and private spaces as effortlessly as they now do. It used to be easier for average citizens and yes, activists, to find a private place to plan and gather support. No more.
Most people who intend to use their presumably guaranteed freedoms under the Constitution to challenge the established order of things find themselves exposed and their efforts circumvented even before they know themselves what the best course of action should be.
Through effective surveillance, powerful people gain the necessary knowledge to enable them to neutralize challengers before they can organize an effective protest against whatever injustice bothers them; before they can even gather like-minded friends and moral support.
If you have a job, chances are excellent your employer has you under surveillance.
It’s not simply transparent and harmless organizations like the Mormon and Catholic churches, for example, who collect intelligence on their congregants with active spy-like organizations operating within their vast bureaucracies, arguably for benign purposes. Many public and private companies, trade organizations, charitable groups and, yes, criminal cartels do the same.
Anyone who shops, whether online, in a shopping mall, or in a particular store is under surveillance. Anyone who parks in public lots is observed. Folks who travel on interstate highways or who amble through cities are always under surveillance.
For those who have jobs, the chances are high that they are under surveillance during the time they are at work, if not after. Every keystroke made on company supplied computers is recorded and analyzed for any number of reasons by sophisticated programs designed to detect unproductive behavior.
Even when walking in our own neighborhoods, friends may watch unobserved through surveillance systems they bought at stores like Best Buy, Target, or Walmart.
When using social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Linked-In, we are observable to people we have never met; we are certainly observable by site-administrators and their friends. And if we happen to be helpless babies, parents may, at any moment, deploy crib monitors to listen-for and watch our every move.
Can we face some unpleasant facts? Rampant spying by unaccountable civilians on other civilians is creepy, for lack of a better word. To my mind, no one is challenging the freedom-corroding surveillance power of the private sector.
