The rise and fall of civilization is because of shopping carts.

While watching my overweight cat swat his partially empty food bowl around and while looking at me accusingly, I was reminded that there are several ways a civilization can fall, some more dramatic and worthy of historians’ attention than others.

I considered how the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that unfortunate trajectory we are all on, in which entropy (disorder and randomness) always increases as time goes on.

I also considered people who don’t put away their shopping carts.

I am not alone in this, to be sure.

The “shopping cart theory” has been discussed muchly. It suggests that whether a person returns their shopping cart after shopping is a test of their moral character and their capacity for self-governance.

You could apply a similar theory to people who put stuff in the cart and then change their minds in the store, leaving things on random shelves instead of returning them to their proper point of origin. Yes, the carton of ice cream will fare badly next to the potato chips, you fool. We could also discuss what women do to piles of clothing at Costco and similar stores, pawing through them like animals without carefully selecting, considering, refolding, and putting them back.

The idea is simple enough: you put things back where they belong. Campers and hikers know the rule slightly differently: pack it in, pack it out. Decent human beings might understand it as a form of the Golden Rule: you leave things better than when you found them. This is the trifecta of civic duty that should be going with you when you are out and about.

Not so with the shopping cart thugs.

If you are one of those folks, listen up: By choosing to take a cart, use it for your convenience, and then leave it wherever you might please—middle of the parking lot, in front of the door, upside down on China—you clearly reveal yourself to be a person without self-control, consideration for others, and even the most basic sense of civic-mindedness. You have no internal guide or drive to do what is right because it is right; instead, you only operate out of coercion and punishment. I blame people like you for the ridiculous amount of laws we have so that we can maintain a clean and organized civil society instead of re-enacting Lord of the Flies every time we leave our house and enter public society.

Not only that, but when multiple people contribute to this pre-larcenous behavior, we enable our leaders to begin acting like King George III. They must put out stupid laws for the smallest things because neighborhood yahoos can’t not fill their front lawn and driveway with scrap metal (true story), mow their lawn and keep noxious weeds like kochia and creeping Jenny under control instead of growing over five feet tall, keep their dogs on their property instead of taking a dump everywhere around town, require curtains for windows instead of sheets and beach towels in apartment buildings, and so on. We want freedom and liberty but because we have no self-control, end up with meddling laws aimed at the lowest common denominator.

I would boldly suggest that a healthy society is filled with people who can do the right thing without laws and punishment hanging over their heads. This requires that people:

1. Know the difference between right and wrong.

2. Value and respect the people around them enough to rein in their own desires or behavior instead of saying “it’s a free country muh rights.”

3. Care to be good civic-minded citizens and contribute to society instead of suckling at its teat.

4. Are not Libertarians.

When our society is full of “it’s not my job” people, it’s a sign that collapse and degradation are already underway. It’s an indication we have a society full of people waiting around for “somebody” to take care of things—fix a problem, lead people, pony up some money, pick up litter, pick up their tab, clean up the mess they made—with the extrapolation being that those expecting others to do things are nobodies. What is this but a ghost society, a facsimile of humans devolving into sloppy animals. We have a growing population of nobodies waiting for somebodies to fix a mess. And the more people do things, even small lazy things, like not returning a shopping cart—a wildly simple thing to do—the more normalized it becomes.

There are valid reasons for not returning your cart, I suppose.

Disability. Child meltdown. Weather. Distance. The idea that that’s what employees are supposed to do.

But let me do some dissection, and confidently state that the only two I think might be valid are disability and toddler-sized tyrants. If you could push the cart out to the lot, you could push it to the corral or back to the store. We Americans are not overexercised, I assure you, and the walk would do us good.

As to shrugging it off as the job of employees, pray, take pause, and consider the state of our employment base in some of these kinds of jobs in the nation. The rescue party is not coming from within the employee base!

I present this brief dissertation as a justification for the scene I created at the grocery store on Sunday—yes, the Lord’s day—after church.

Not only was I confronted with two shopping carts upon walking into the store’s coffee shop to the point that I had to practically climb over them and walk through the bathroom area to get inside, a level of shopping cart degeneracy I’d not seen before, and also, good luck if that were needed as an emergency exit.

A couple with a child at a table near the door had their cart nearby, potentially constituting a third violation. I did not take their cart, but they witnessed the scene of me angrily grabbing the carts, my comments on lazy people who can’t return their carts, and watched as I left to push them through the store, powered by the infamous Neidlinger temper, to where they belonged.

That couple saw it go down, and they chose to leave their cart where the other two had been when they left, walking out the door, around their cart.

Perhaps they thought it funny to make the old white lady lose her mind. But stereotypes abound, folks, and one was reinforced that day. An older white man came in and pushed the cart to its designated spot before I had a chance to do so. Other people came and went, I was told by friends waiting in the coffee shop as we discussed it, and these people chose to simply walk around the carts, giving them an annoyed look, but doing nothing about it.

What a disgusting state we have when our general citizens, people who consider themselves good people, probably, contribute to the mess, or worse, won’t stoop to be a somebody and clean it up. When enough people start doing a bad behavior and enough others won’t push back, it becomes normalized. Social expectations have shifted. Independent morality is crushed under slovenly group behavior.

It’s somebody else’s job.

Somebody else will do it.

That’s what the employees are for.

That’s why I pay the taxes.

I didn’t make that mess.

Americans, those who dwelleth in a nation in which the food aisles are plentiful and the generations that came before took pride in their community and in being a citizen, cannot seem to PUT THEIR CART BACK AFTER SHOPPING.

We are an empire collapsing.

Our voluntary behavior is shifting toward distrust, a lack of cooperation, and slipping ethics. We decry political polarization and the moral decay, but if we trace it down to the fine points, we discover that even the “good” citizens decrying such things are unwilling to clean up a mess and be a somebody. Their disgust for the nobodies who require somebodies has made them into a nobody.

Do you not understand that if you can’t put a cart away, can’t clean up your own mess at the table, that you shouldn’t be griping about higher levels of decay? Decay starts small, at the base, and spreads to something larger. It starts with the individual.

At least my mom, whom I’ve had to pull out of various landscaping plots upon entering and leaving stores because she spotted thistle or pigweed and wandered in to make the county weed board proud, has passed on the desire for me to want to pull weeds from commercial properties that can’t seem to maintain their greenery. If I’m going to turn into someone, that’s a good model. Bad civic behavior is like those weeds: you let it grow and go to seed, and it spreads exponentially. Rip it out when you see it.

Return your shopping cart.

Clean up your table.

Clean up someone else’s table.

Push in your chair.

Put your garbage in a garbage can.

Pick up litter.

Return items to the right shelf in the store.

Fold the clothes you took from the pile.

Leave this world better than how you found it, because God knows most people are doing the opposite and we’re five minutes away from looking like a landfill.