Once upon a time, I had a truck, and it was a nice truck. Unfortunately, this truck got towed -- all the time. As a matter of fact, this truck's passenger seat was littered with tickets from the Borough of State College and the cities of Harrisburg and Philadelphia.

It was quite a sight, orange and yellow and beige mini-envelopes spread like leaves throughout the entire cab. Even with the bright colors, that are supposed to attract the attention of normal human beings to remind them of the debt they must repay society for parking in the wrong spot, I ignored them.

I ignored them for so long that I woke up one morning only to discover that my truck had been stolen from its unofficial parking spot on Locust Lane. Then I realized this is State College, and nobody steals cars in State College.

I paid all of the tickets and the boot fee and the towing fee and the storage fee and the administrative fee until I was finally broke.

So broke that I didn't have the money to purchase a parking pass, or food for that matter. Thus began the vicious cycle of tickets, boots and tow trucks.

Sure, I did it to myself; I should have paid those tickets the first time around. Had I only done that, I would never have opened myself up to the perpetual towing I experienced over the next two years in State College.

I made a mistake. We all make mistakes.

It just seems that certain people have a knack for recovering from their mistakes in a quicker fashion than others. I call these people "rich people."

Now, before all the crazy, conservative-capitalists start yelling at the paper demanding I stand trial before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, I just want to say there is nothing wrong with being rich. Hell, I have a lot of "rich" friends. I know that rich people are just like everyone else, with one key difference -- they have a ton of money.

In America and the world, money equals justice.

I don't really feel like getting into the many examples of rich famous people getting off the hook for murder, or drug abuse, or spousal abuse or any other offense listed under the California penal code.

Instead, I want to talk about normal people, and the lack of a margin of error in life. Normal people can quickly become poor folk, and we all know there is no justice in America for poor folk. It has been all used up by the rich people.

It might only take one mistake, one mistake that leads to others almost as if it were a self-fulfilling prophecy. Which leads me to the point of this rant -- mercy.

So many in this country want a criminal justice system built upon vindication rather than rehabilitation. Revenge dominates the minds of those in charge and drowns out mercy. In fact, mercy has become synonymous with weakness.

Revenge only creates more problems, as criminals are shipped off to correctional facilities with little effort to address the root problem that put them there in the first place.

That root problem might be anything from a mental disorder to a societal disorder.

Regardless, the person did commit the crime and it was ultimately their fault. However, we must understand what drives a person to violate the rules of a given society.

This understanding must exist in international policy as well. Instead of blindly attacking nations and people in response to what they may have done to us, perhaps we should also understand why we were attacked in the first place.

Our society is too quick to blame first, ask questions later. Knowledge is the only way that we might be able to squirm out of this quagmire and into some form of peace.

We need to understand that in order to preserve the American way of life, we might have violated the rights of others along the way.

We, the rich, might have done just enough to drive a normal country into a cycle of war and poverty. I'm not laying blame on our country for terrorism or war in general. Instead, I'm saying that we must understand what we have done as citizens of this world to create an environment that might foster the creation of murderers and terrorists.

It's not so easy to say that others in the world simply envy our way of life.

Everything has a cause and effect; we must understand our role in the cause.

I realized that I might not be able to afford my truck, so I sold it. I didn't get anymore parking tickets and I didn't get towed anymore. I know it's not that easy; however, solutions rarely are.

A little mercy has a great effect. Maybe we should stop being so worrisome about being soft, and pay a little more attention to what creates the contempt we are fighting now throughout the world and in our own country.

We are, after all, the rich people of the world that have a margin of error for experimentation.