It’s here once more: Thanksgiving Day. Also known as the Feast of St. Gluttony here at the Fortress. I’m of two minds about this holiday.
On the one hand, it’s entirely appropriate for Americans to be thankful for our country – and in that phrase lies a powerful truth: it’s our country. No one else anywhere has anything like it. Our forebears built it, but we, its citizens, operate it and keep it going.
On the other hand: only one day for giving thanks? Seems a bit... spare. Niggardly. As if we were too busy to remember and celebrate all we have and enjoy, day after day. “Sorry, can’t stop and give thinks just now; I’ve got emails to answer. What’s that you say? We should pray? Who has the time for that?”
On the gripping hand (All right, make it three minds.) (Cf. this seminal novel) not everything around us is to be celebrated. No, I shan’t enumerate all the burrs under my saddle; it’s Thanksgiving Day. Anyway, you probably have your own set.
But today, on the 73rd Thanksgiving Day of my life, I have something new to be grateful for. You may find it odd. Eccentric. But remember who’s writing this.
I’m grateful that I’ve been conned enough, and in enough different ways, that I’ve unlearned my gullibility sufficiently to have evaded the biggest con of my life.
I have no real idea whether my would-be con artist is a man or a woman. As she represented herself as a woman, I’ll treat her as such. Call her Jane.
Jane has held a long conversation with me over Google Chat. She claimed to be a retired actress of minor stature. Either she boned up on that actress, or she really is that person; it doesn’t matter much.
After about eight weeks chatting me up, including compliments of the most flattering kind, Jane cast her line: a former husband who was using a shared financial obligation to abuse her and her son. It was a good cast: poignant, sorrowful, adequately protracted and detailed... everything required to lure in an old softy like your humble Curmudgeon. And I, being that old softy, bit the hook.
Jane let me know, indirectly, that she needed money to exclude that former husband from her life. She didn’t come out and say “Can you help me?” She merely implied, quite adroitly, that help would be welcome. Low key. Lots of half-suppressed suffering. I could imagine the Sorrowing Madonna look on her face.
...and I immediately offered to help.
We pause here for raucous laughter from those Gentle Readers who must vent it.
A tiny current in my forebrain redirected my limbic reaction just in time: Are you certain this is really someone who needs and deserves your help? After all, I hadn’t done much research on Jane. As a former actress, there should be plenty of material on the Web about her, but I had yet to look for any. So I did.
It developed that Jane – i.e., the retired actress she claimed to be – has a net worth in eight digits, that she’d recently purchased an expensive home in a glamorous part of California, that she controls at least two companies, including a production company, and that she employs a management team and a personal assistant. The financial obligation she’d lamented to me was, if not dismissibly trivial, at least minor.
That sent me back over some other curious behavior Jane had displayed. I re-examined it with clearer, more skeptical eyes. It followed a familiar pattern: one characteristic of a Con Under Construction. I chided myself for not seeing it previously.
One such curious behavior was part of Jane’s current appeal. Once I’d detected the conformance-to-pattern, the scales fell from my eyes. I was being had. Jane had discerned in me the key attributes of a con-victim: the willingness to trust and the urge to help.
Mind you, “Jane” was a stream of characters from over the Internet. A TCP/IP packet stream. I hadn’t seen her in real time. I hadn’t even heard her voice. And I was about to send her money.
It’s true, Gentle Reader: There’s no fool like an old fool.
I’ve backed away, of course, but I feel terrible about it even so. Yes, I kept a swindler’s fingers out of my wallet, but before that I’d ignored many warning signs that I could now recognize. Worse, I’d disclosed information about myself that persuaded Jane to see me as a target! What was I thinking?
Answer: I wasn’t. But I woke up in time, and for that, on this fourth Thursday of November in the Year of Our Lord 2025, I give thanks.
I’ve written many times about the decline in trustworthiness and trust among us. It’s cost this nation dearly. Yet I hadn’t done my personal part in responding to it: I hadn’t become appropriately suspicious and defensive. That is the required response to the plague of deceit that’s upon us, and I had yet to accept my part in it.
I have now.
May you all, wherever you are in the world, enjoy a happy and appropriately filling Thanksgiving Day. And may you remember that predators lurk among us. Many wear winning, appealing faces. Strive not to attract their attention. Should one solicit your attention, do your research. Be skeptical, even cynical, for in those attitudes lies survival.
May God bless and keep you all.
"Be skeptical, even cynical"
ReplyDeleteBe the first, but not the second. Use the latter only as the ancient tool of the true journalist would: as a challenge aimed at a suspected charlatan useful for prying up his mask.
Being cynical tends to burden one's soul and to society in general.
As you may recall, I often declare the natural inclination for skepticism to be a gift: a super power.
As for cynicism, I pray readers will see and pass along this warning.