This holiday will only work if it is observed by big thieves, not just small fry. Cookers of books, Ponzi schemers, scrupleless traders, and accountants addicted to drugs and gambling will need to observe the day as much as petty cashiers, banking clerks, parking-meter attendants, coin-laundry collectors, slot-machine operators and traffic court judges. Not everyone will observe — just like not everyone stops smoking on Smoke-Free Day — but if enough people try, the results will be palpable.
Theft-Free Day will get better every year until we can eventually expand it to a Theft-Free Week. Imagine! A whole week during which no one steals anything. Hard to imagine, I know, but everybody used to smoke, too.
I know that I'm a dreamer, but what if we had a whole Theft-Free Month, like Poetry Month? April is traditionally Poetry Month, but there is no reason why it shouldn't double in the future as Theft-Free Month. Well, I'm not going as far as to suggest that everyone should observe a whole month without ripping anything off — that's probably a bit visionary. Certainly, professional thieves will be exempt: That's their job, after all, and they have enough problems with something called the law.
Still, even if we left out the people who make a living at it — muggers, bank robbers and the like — it would still be something if all the rest of us so-called law-abiding citizens — regular folks like Wall Street tycoons, CEOs and just-plain professionals, contractors and workaday drudges — would take our hands out of the till for a day, a week or a month. We would simply quit taking bribes, faking receipts, padding expense accounts and inflating budgets for that short time.
I know that a certain amount of thievery is built into the general economy and accounted for, but it's gotten out of hand. If it doesn't work and it wrecks the economy instead, we can just go back to Poetry Month. - Andrei Condrescu
