Posted August 13 2008 by Matt Kahnert
Good Samaritans and Basic Honesty
When I began my summer internship, writing about honesty and selflessness was the last thing I thought I’d be doing.
I started right in the middle of one of the biggest summer news stories in Northern Virginia, which featured us at the center of the storm. A local couple found a $40,000 diamond ring in a parking garage nearby, and brought the ring to us to track down the owner. They said they just wanted to do the right thing and asked for nothing in return.
It was one of my first days at Mervis Diamond Importers, a Washington DC jewelry store, and I was somewhat overwhelmed by the buzz that surrounded the place. We had reporters and media people swarming the building, from Washington Post and a bevvy of local TV stations. It seemed all the reporters kept repeating the same amazement and admiration for the “good Samaritans.” Paraphrased in different metaphors, each station had its own way of saying, “What honest and good people these are.”
Let me explain the situation a bit more. The couple not only had the motivation to return something that wasn’t theirs, but when the they discovered the “Mervis” inscription in the band, they then drove a good distance out of their way to our store.
How easy it would have been to keep it, and rationalize that there’s no way we could ever find the real owner anyway. In fact, many people admitted on message boards that they would have kept it if they were in similar circumstances.
If you are of the mindset that people are inherently selfish or bad, perhaps this story might spur a little bit of hope that good people do exist. And in my opinion, they’re not so rare either.
There are plenty of good people out there, but perhaps the problem is there’s not enough “good news” in the media. I think the media is actually hungry for “good news” and it’s their own fault for consistently ignoring such news in favor of sex scandals and neighborhood murders. As soon as the word got out, papers like The New York Times and USA Today jumped on the story. It obviously represented something rare to them.
In a world that constantly faces corruption, destruction, and dishonesty, newspapers and magazines rarely find time to document some of the little things that people do that one would categorize as good. Those are the things that people need to be reminded of the most: the things that inspire and keep hope alive.
This summer has shown me a lot about the character of people. Some people would have found that $40,000 ring and seen a payday. That’s just how they are, and in a world so driven by the laws of economics, cashing in on such easy money just might have made sense to them. All I know is that when I saw the Stetzers present that diamond ring to the long-lost owner, with all the tears and the laughter, they were elated that they had done it. No amount of money in the world would have ever changed how they went about the entire situation.
Diamond Ring Returned to Owner
The great part about this story is that the Stetzers aren’t superheroes. They’re normal people, like you and I. Anyone can do the right thing: We just have to recognize the opportunities when they arise.
As a result of the story, we now had other people contact us in hopes that we could help them find their lost jewelry too. It was almost comedic at first that now we became diamond detectives, but we realized quickly that we had an amazing opportunity to actually make a difference here. We created a new Diamond Ring Lost and Found site that is exclusively for lost diamond rings. It’s a basic site where you can post information on what you’ve lost or what you’ve found.
If we can facilitate communication between those losing their rings, and those finding rings, then hopefully we can make a match. We can’t force people to be honest, but hopefully we can encourage them to do the right thing by giving them a free tool like this.
At least now if you find a diamond ring, and you’ve read this post, you can’t claim ignorance and rationalize, “I could never find the real owner anyway.”
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2 Comments currently posted. 
Jerusalemite says:
Michael Blaine says:
They should not have sold the ring but instead sold it and given the money to a children’s charity.
The diamond business is immoral. Such a fetish over ultra-dense carbon is sick.
Wow. That was a really great story. Makes one wonder what they would do in that situation..
You are right, perhaps they aren’t heroes- but definitely special people. Kudos