Hoisting Petards

            Here is a category in which a state does not want to lead the nation: staged accidents. According to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, Florida leads the nation in staged automobile accidents. These Floridians do so to rob insurance companies out of thousands of dollars.

            Some of these citizens have ingeniously used technicalities of existing state law. Through their machinations, they have individually robbed insurance companies of as much as $10,000 on nonexistent accidents. They pull off these heists by taking advantage of the fact that, in Florida, one is not required to prove that any party (involved in an accident) was negligent.

            These abuses of the law reflect a spirit of greed. There will be consequences. This behavior inevitably drives up insurance rates for everyone.

            In HAMLET, Shakespeare wrote a phrase that we have translated into a figure of speech—“hoist with his own petard.” It means the equivalent of a bomb maker blowing himself up with his own bomb.

            Greed is motivating too many Americans to “hoist with [their] own petards.”

Working for the Hosts of Heaven

Today is Martin Luther King Day. I consider Dr. King to be one of the most important human beings of the twentieth century.

Within the civil rights movement, Dr. King sought to motivate men and women to offer their very best to God. In that context, King declared, "If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted and Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of Heaven and Earth shall pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’"

Those words have inspired millions. From the day I encountered that quote, it, too, has motivated me.