What Can You Learn From Al Capone?

I try to avoid the malls around the holidays for the same reason that many of you do.

Too many people, too much chaos and too much confusion.

I am not interested in running with the hordes to try and save 20% on some item I’ll only use once but buy because it is too good a deal to pass up.

Can’t say that I don’t look at the ads ever or that I never feel the urge to try and see if maybe I can’t find that one thing I truly can’t live without because I do.

But I also make a point to think about what I want and what I need so that I can focus my efforts on obtaining things that add to my life and don’t subtract.

That is how I ended up in a grocery store around Thanksgiving and why I was willing to fight through the crowds, I didn’t just want food, I needed it.

It is also what made me think of that Al Capone quote above.

What Can You Learn From Al Capone?

Blame it on the mother who banged her cart into me three times.

Apparently my steely-eyed glare wasn’t steely enough to get her attention.

Why?

Because she told her daughter that she wasn’t going to apologize for hitting me because I wasn’t moving fast enough down an aisle.

I didn’t respond to it because I figured someone who was dumb enough to say that kind of thing out loud was looking for trouble and I wasn’t interested.

That’s when that Capone quote popped up inside the old melon and I wondered if she had really thought about the potential consequences of acting like an ass in public because when you pull a card from the deck you never know when that joker is going to show up.

Later on as I went to sleep I thought about her kids and what a poor example she set and wondered how many good people are forgotten and how many bad are remembered.

Capone isn’t a good who should be lauded as a saint, yet it was his words that floated through my head.

Yet I have to concede I have thought about those words a time or two as being useful for helping to teach my kids to advocate for themselves.

You don’t have to take them to mean that every time someone messes with you the correct response is violence. There is a middle ground where it means you stand up for yourself.

Been thinking about these words since I heard them in The Walking Dead and trying to figure out if that was the first time I heard them.

Doesn’t really matter, doesn’t make me like them more or less.

What resonates with me is how you can use them to help move you through the hard moments.

It is something we all share as people. We all have hard moments and the question of what comes from or after them is often based upon how we respond.

If you can look at that time and say that someday the pain and discomfort will help you, well then maybe that moment will be easier to bear.

Might not be, might not be helpful at all but if it is, well it is a better resource and tool than some of of the other options you can choose now isn’t it.