Let's take another shot at this. I suspected I would get clobbered with last week's column about a piece by personal finance columnist Darnell Mayberry. He bought a table with no intention of keeping it, used it once and took advantage of the store’s no-questions-asked return policy to get his money back. I was clobbered indeed, although not by everyone. Some took the column in the spirit it was offered, an invitation to look at the world from someone else’s eyes. The majority were condemning. I was taken aback by the number of people who sat on high horses to scorn what our columnist did as unethical – calling it evidence of the ruination of society. They scolded me, declaring everyone should adhere to a basic ethical code, which they said they would never consider violating as our columnist did. With every expectation of getting clobbered again, I'm coming back on this topic. And I start with this question: Do you speed? I mean it. When you drive, do you exceed the posted speed limits? The state of Ohio and local communities set speed limits for safety. They determine the proper speed based on multiple factors, with the chief aim of keeping motorists, pedestrians, bicyclists and everyone else safe. That means that when we speed, we not only break the law. We endanger everyone else on the road. Study after study has shown that a chief cause of crashes that injure and kill is excessive speeding. I'll put about 15,000 miles on my car this year. I drive a good bit on the Ohio Turnpike (70 mph), Cleveland highways (60 mph) and local roads like Opportunity Corridor (35 mph.) My experience is that at least 90 percent of the people on those roads exceed the speed limit, and those adhering to the posted speeds get harassed by those who don't for slowing them down. Darnell, in returning the table undamaged after a single use, did not break any laws. He did not break any rules. He played by them. Yes, he gamed the system, but for all of those people who wrote to me about how terrible it is that people game the system these days, I ask again: Do you speed? Do you game the system by counting on lax enforcement to get away with it? When we do that, we do something Darnell did not. We break the law. I'll come back to the speeding question in a bit, but next, let's take up another parallel to the return of the table, one straight from the world of retail sales. Not all that long ago, discount coupons were all the rage. Retailers and makers of goods flooded the marketplace with them, hoping to attract customers into their stores or bait consumers into trying their products. Newspapers like The Plain Dealer sold a lot of copies to people who wanted those coupons. The retail industry did not issue discount coupons out of the goodness of their hearts any more than do retailers today weho boast of their no-questions-asked return policies. They issued coupons because they sold more goods. What they lost in the discounts, they more than made up in extra sales and customer loyalty. But, and this is key, retailers had formulas for what the coupons would cost them. They knew that the vast majority of coupons they distributed would end up in trash bins, unused. What the retailers did not see coming was exploitation. Groups formed to trade coupons like baseball cards. People wrote books, hosted internet swap sites and used other platforms to describe their strategies. They traded coupons they did not want for those they had a use for, with some saving extraordinary sums of cash. News organizations covered the coupon craze quite a bit, lionizing people who filled their home with items at low cost. Retailers had not counted on this. The trend meant that more of the coupons they distributed were used, which affected their bottom lines. I don't remember anyone scorning those who exploited the coupon policies, even though, if memory serves, the coupons had disclaimers on them restricting that abuse. So, for those who wrote from positions of such haughty outrage about what Darnell did, did you show equal dissatisfaction with the coupon traders? It's directly parallel. I also have to mention an odd element of a percentage of the notes I received last week. Some of those who condemned Darnell mentioned he is Black. That’s ridiculous. This issue has nothing to do with race. Darnell is a professional sports writer and father who writes a blog and column about personal finance and how he is trying to teach his daughter financial responsibility. His topic has nothing to do with race. It is about an issue affecting all races. Why would writers go out of their way to mention race? While we're on the subject of race, though, let's go back to the speeding issue. Black people, and just about anyone who is not white, don't have the same luxury that white people have to liberally flout speed limits. They are painfully aware of the history of racial profiling by police in America and know that when they speed, they have been far more likely to get a ticket than white drivers. Speeding is a form of rule-breaking where race does matter. Store returns is not. My aim with last week's column was to persuade readers to examine a situation from another's vantage point, to build empathy. My point this week is to ask who has the right to throw stones. Almost all of us pick our shortcuts, whether it’s speeding, abusing coupon policy, returning items to stores or any of another thousand ways we might bend rules to fit our needs and desires. For some of us, speed limits might feel too low, so we ignore them. For Darnell, the pressing situation in his life is money -- in a way older generations have not experienced. People of my generation grew up while this nation still kept its promise to provide higher education at a reasonable cost. Younger generations today enter adulthood with stultifying levels of debt that were unimaginable when I was younger. Thus, younger generations attack their fiscal situations in ways that older generations would not. Maybe this week, instead of asking readers to imagine walking in Darnell's shoes, I should ask that they do so while thinking back on times they might have bent the rules or took shortcuts that some might question as unethical. None of us is pure. We’re human, after all. I’m at cquinn@cleveland.com. Thanks for reading. | 