Whitman's Good Samaritans

Here's a sample of the inane lost and found e-mails we suffer daily. I will include the student's name, and I'm still pondering on leaving his campus address so you can leave flaming sacks of cow shite (or hey, borrow some of ours) outside his door.

I've edited the following with parentheticals to better represent its asininity:

From: Nicholas J Denton-Brown

Lose an ipod? (trust me, it's safe in my hands. I wanted to make sure no other sketchy Whitman students might try to steal it, so I picked it up, probably right before you came running back looking for it). Let me know where you lost it (because, hey, I don't trust you) and what music is on it (enumerate to me your whole library, down to even the Andrew W.K. b-sides; because Britney Spears' "Toxic" isn't specific enough -- everyone has that gem), and it's yours again (but until then, I'm going to use it with wanton disregard, awesome!)

I see this type of e-mail every day. I was surprised not to read "I found an iPod, tell me the name and the e-mail address engraved permanently on the back and I'll send it back to you." The running protocol around campus is that each of us is trustworthy enough to take lost possessions into our security, but that our peers can't be trusted similarly. They, instead, must be run through all sorts of tests and secret fraternal grips and paternity tests before some cracked Frisbee or iodine-stained Nalgene can be returned.

I don't know how this specious return policy first evolved, or why each year's freshmen adopt it as quickly as any of our other ridiculous attitudes (read philosophies: "the best party is the one I haven't visited yet" or "cowboy costume = pink leopard print foam dome").

I apologize world, but here are your future philanthropists, a ruined batch of people who think their general benignity entrusts them with the care of other people's welfare. Here are your heads of Red Cross, those who sit on a Fort Knox of donations entrusted to them, but unwilling to put trust in the poor who need it. Each holding out the hope that, perhaps, the poor won't be able to navigate the bureaucratic labrynth to their money -- that the person who lost his iPod might just miss the e-mail you sent out.