Observing Time 🏴‍☠️

Jose Alba stood trapped inside a two-foot space behind a grocery counter in Manhattan while an ex-con on parole grabbed him by the collar. Alba was sixty-one years old and worked late shifts at a corner bodega on Broadway to support his family. He had zero criminal record in his entire life. On the night of July 1, 2022, a customer's card was declined for a bag of chips. Seconds later, her thirty-five-year-old boyfriend, Austin Simon, stormed behind the private employee counter. Simon was on parole for assaulting a police officer and had eight prior arrests. He shoved the sixty-one-year-old clerk into a chair, towered over him in the dead-end aisle, and tried to drag him out. With no back door and nowhere to run, Alba reached for a store box cutter to save his own life. During the struggle, Simon's girlfriend pulled a knife from her own purse and stabbed Alba in the arm. Here is what Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg did next. Bragg's office did not charge the girlfriend who stabbed the clerk. Instead, prosecutors charged sixty-one-year-old Jose Alba with second-degree murder, asked for $500,000 bail, and locked him inside Rikers Island with an untreated stab wound. Hardworking Americans rallied across the country and forced the District Attorney to drop every charge eighteen days later, though Alba was forced to leave his job in fear for his life. A civilization begins to rot the moment its prosecutors protect violent predators and put handcuffs on working men who refuse to die quietly.

An ice cream company president in Japan stood in a dark suit in front of a hundred factory workers and bowed on national television over nine cents. His company makes the blue soda popsicle that every kid in Japan buys with pocket change after baseball practice on a hot summer afternoon. For a quarter of a century, the company fought inflation to keep the price at roughly forty cents—because everyone in the factory knew little kids were counting coins in front of the freezer case. When soaring ingredient costs finally forced them to raise the price by nine cents, the executives refused to shrink the popsicle behind the scenes or hide the increase in fine print. Instead, the president and a hundred employees lined up outside company headquarters, stood still for sixty seconds on prime-time television, and bowed in silent apology to the children of Japan. Nobody was angry. Sales jumped ten percent the very next month because parents wanted to support a company that treated a child's allowance like a sacred contract. A nation's integrity is not measured by the size of its corporations, but by how honestly they treat a child holding a handful of coins.