You Can Tell A Lot. Really?

I am amused by Twitter.  I like the pithy-ness of it, and there is more substance that FB posts, although far less personal. 

Case in point, a minister (not a minister from my church) whose tweets I follow wrote, "you can tell a lot about a person by whether or not they return a grocery cart." 

My snarky response was, Really?

What can you tell about a person based on his or her willingness to politely return the cart to the return bin?

I think you can clearly tell that the person is polite about retuning the cart to the bin.  Period.

It points to a problem of how we value and evaluate each other and frankly ourselves.   While I appreciate the gesture of following the cart return bin request and all requests, the acts proves nothing about the person who commits it or fails to commit it. 

Good people leave carts next to cars and bad people return them to bins.  At the risk of sounding critical, the minister should know better.  Sound theology would say we are all bad regardless of our cart courtesy, but it makes us feel better to be on the polite side of the "rule". 

Whats my point?  I am not sure.  Is this a comment about the limits of Twitter.  Perhaps.  Is it a practical application of the dangers of judging others and pride?  Perhaps. 

I think my point is that returning a grocery cart is a simple and helpful gesture.  It's nice to be helpful, but it's nothing more.  Failing to return the cart may make parking in that spot annoying, it may add a few seconds to a store employee's work--but all in all you can't tell anything about a person by the way he or she manges a cart.  Really.