Today is Tax Day. I'm always an early filer, so this media holiday never means a lot to me personally, but there's definitely a buzz in the air for those who waited until the last minute to settle the yearly books with Uncle Sam.
While on my way into work this morning (#5 bus, circa 6 am), I overheard a man and a woman talking about tax refund identity theft. I'm not sure if this is a new fraud strategy, or if it's simply getting lots of media buzz this year, but I keep hearing warnings about it on the news and talk shows. Because of this, I instantly knew what the woman two rows behind me was talking about, but I kept quiet. I finally ended up turning around and chiming in when her male friend started generalizing about how we'll be going back to filing our taxes on paper soon in order to be more protected. He also started telling her a story about someone who was a victim of burglary simply because he placed his keys down and someone took a photo of them, and then got a copy of the key made from the photo.
Maybe because of I recently listened to this great podcast about social media and the interconnection of our online and offline lives, but this last bit prompted me to turn around and chime in that my gut tells me that technology isn't necessarily the problem. I'm not sure that people are suddenly victimizing others or being victimized any more than they were before...they're just using different methods to do so. I'm feeling tempted to go and research this from a factual standpoint (do we really have more theft, or is it just distributed differently, now that technology allows it), and I think I will.
But in the meanwhile, it brings to mind an interesting spiritual question: does sin grow or simply morph? As societies and cultures change, do the larger "sin themes" just change, or do we have more of them all together now? My thought is that we are still just victims of the same ol' human weaknesses and 7 deadly sins (greed in this case, I guess), and that rather than trying to find a censoring technological solution to what I believe is a spiritual problem (not enough love and respect for one another), we might want to consider a different way of coexisting.
