Vidalia onions have made Vidalia Georgia a household name because of the fertile land around that community that arguably produces the best flavored onions in the country. What Vidalia onions are to Georgia, Smith County watermelons are to Smith County Mississippi. They are as sweet as they come, and this time of the year vendors line up and down the highways surrounding Smith County selling them out of their trailers. I bought a big one yesterday and it is chilling right now. Oh yeah!
I heard an interesting story about Smith watermelons the other day. As with most things in life whenever someone is working hard to make an honest living, someone else is right there trying to make a fast buck by stealing the profit from their hard effort and risks. Apparently Smith County watermelons are no exception.
I heard a story of a watermelon farmer who noticed car tracks entering his remote watermelon field and he knew that a thief was stealing watermelons at night. This went on for a while. but he couldn’t catch the thieves by staking it out at night or canvassing the couple of families who lived on the rural gravel road a couple of miles from his field.
He thought about it for some time and suddenly Eureka! He had brainstorm. He had come up with what he considered to be a brilliant plan of how to scare the thieves away and save what little profit he stood to make. He constructed a big sign and painted the following warning to the thieves.
“One of the watermelons in this field has poison in it.
He was congratulating himself on how clever he was until the next day when he went back to check on his field and he noticed fresh paint that someone had painted right below the original wording on his sign. It said:
Now there are two!
Although this story is humorous, theft is no laughing matter to business owners. Shocking videos have laid bare America’s $100 billion-per-year shoplifting crisis, with brazen thieves strolling out of stores including Home Depot, Walgreens, Macys, grocery stores, and a myriad of others with their arms, duffle bags, and shopping carts full of stolen goods.
WOKE politicians are changing laws to allow people out of jail without posting bail using idiotic WOKE justifications thinking that poor people cannot make bail while others can and that is discrimination.
Huh?
Discrimination of thieves? You have got to be kidding . . .
Additionally, cases are not being prosecuted due to overloaded courts, and liberal prosecutors that refuse to pursue cases due to misguided sympathy to the thieves and disdain for victims.
I know how it feels to be a victim of thieves. I had over a million dollars of cash and inventory stolen from my first company. It took me seven years to recover from it and I very nearly had to take bankruptcy. I had risked everything to start that company and had worked literally 20 hours a day seven days a week for seven years to get it off the ground and running. The thieves nearly destroyed it in just a few days.
We tend to think of big Fortune 500 companies with insurance covering them as victims of theft and there is little empathy for them. Well, I’m here to tell you it happens to all businesses, mega, large, small, and tiny. This is not a case of Robin Hood robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. It is evil people who are thieves who are too lazy to work.
Maybe you think this is the business owner’s problem but consider this: A business cannot sustain losses like that and survive for long. The first thing they are forced to do is reduce labor costs meaning people lose their jobs. In my company I had 64 employees prior to discovering the theft and reduced it to just 19 in three days. These were good people who needed their jobs.
If they survive business owners are forced to pass on the lost revenue via increased prices that further add to our inflation woes. Insurance companies in particular raise their rates and in many cases refuse to even write insurance. Sadly, the only winners are the brazen thieves who steal with impunity and laugh at the security personnel at stores and authorities and hit the same stores over and again with gangs of thieves stealing millions in merchandise daily, sometimes hitting the same store four times a day.
Our country seems to be losing the battle against evil at virtually every turn. I pray for our nation every day and suggest that you do as well. Currently anarchy prevails in our beloved country and the hardened hearts of these thieves remind me of a runaway locomotive heading for a washed-out bridge that spans a place called hell.
Matthew 15:19
For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.