Is honesty a lost art?

There is a saying out there, "No good deed goes unpunished".  Here recently, my family has gained precious experience with just how true that statement is.

See, for just shy of two years we have had no income.  We have been surviving on student loans and odd jobs.  I have recently started making and selling various baked goods to try to bring in money, as our situation is getting kind of desperate now.

We were receiving food stamps, but when we got our income tax refund, I reported it to my case worker, just like I had been told to, who then called me and said that we had too much money and so the state took our food stamps away.  So, basically we were punished for being honest.  We know other people who are also receiving food stamps that did not report their income tax refunds and they did not lose their assistance.  So if honesty is always the best policy, why are the honest people being punished?  Is honesty the best policy?

My karma (and my religious beliefs) tells me that yes, it is best to be honest.  I believe that whatever we send out into the universe, either good or bad, returns to us three times over.  So, if we lie or do something bad, that energy comes back to us three times worse than what we did.  The same thing happens if we do good.  We get that positive energy back threefold, too.

But sometimes it is difficult to be honest and to do the right thing, especially when you know that it will result in negative things happening.  Sometimes it is easier and less trouble to take the easy way out.  Unfortunately, that results in horrible things coming back around on us at some point in the future.  So I guess it comes down to being honorable and doing the right thing now, even though it will result in temporary hardship or doing the wrong thing now and making things easier in the short term, even though it will make things that much harder later on.

It is difficult to be a good person and to do the right thing, but in the long run, it's probably in our best interests to do it anyway.

Another observation I have made is that when someone encounters an honest person, they don't always know how to handle that.  We had gone to a big-box store one evening to do a little shopping.  In the parking spot next to us was a brand new coffee maker, still in it's unopened packaging.  We waited for a few moments to ask the person who was getting into that vehicle if the coffee maker was hers.  She said no, so we took it into the store and got in the Customer Service line.

Once we navigated through the throng of people to the counter, we handed the coffee maker to the lady at the register and told her that we had found it in the parking lot and thought it should be brought back in.  She looked confused as she took it from us, and after a moment she said, "Well, thank you for being honest".  Like it was something she had not encountered in a while.  I'm certain she does not happen across a whole lot of honesty in her job, but it still saddens me that she was so shocked by people trying to do the right thing.

Another recent change I have noticed that goes along with honesty is in a store I frequently shop in, Aldi.  They do have plastic and paper shopping bags for sale, but people have to purchase them separately, the price is not included in their food purchase.  The bags are inexpensive and used to be available under the conveyer belt for customers to grab and put up with their food.  The bags are no longer located in places where customers can access them.  Seems that people were stealing the bags and lying about it, so management moved the bags behind the cash register where the cashier sits so if someone needs bags, they have to tell the cashier who then retrieves the requested number of bags and charges the customer accordingly.

I understand that times are hard for a lot of people, my family included.  I do not understand stealing shopping bags.  Aldi happily encourages people to bring in their own bags, whether cloth, plastic or paper.  They don't even mind if people grab boxes off the shelves to put their purchases in.  Maybe I am just too simple to understand the mentality that would cause someone to steal a $.05 cent shopping bag, but it just makes no sense to me.

If anyone has any thoughts, insights, epiphanies, bitches or whatever, please leave me a comment.  If you can help me understand the mentality of so many of the people we share the planet with, please enlighten me!