We live in a world of strangeness. The rich get richer, and the criminal is arrested more than one time. 

I took a Citizens Academy years ago, and one thing that stuck in my mind was the fact that so many times, a criminal will come from a family of criminals.

You just say one of their family names, like Younger, as in Younger brothers, and you look it up on the jail roster and discover mother, brother, uncle, sister, father, and a host of other relatives are all in the same boat and probably have an arrest record.

I know it’s hard to look at things that way because we want people to be judged on their own merits and not on their family name.

Another coincidence is if someone is arrested for one crime, and it may be a petty crime, that person will always be suspected of breaking the law in that area. 

For example, there is a guy who is known to go to bars a lot and drink a lot. He cannot drive because he has a driving under the influence charge against him. Yet it is said, that even if he is in a vehicle just riding  with  others, his associates are often pulled over just by virtue of his presence, putting them all at risk for the charge of drunk driving.

Again, the same holds true about birds of a feather who love to flock together. Sadly, his friends do not want to go out drinking with him for that very reason.. because they are all drunks, and still drink and drive, to them that is ok, but they don’t want to be seen with him.

Once a person is judged as doing something wrong, that person will always be suspected of backsliding and doing that again and again. 

We like to give others the benefit of the doubt, but more experienced people, like the authorities, seem to have a very skeptic view of human nature.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if all of us were born and raised in a family of winners, whose very name conjures up the vision of a family of law-abiding citizens.

It would be great if we never had a reason to make a mistake, or never found ourselves in bad company. Sadly, not everyone is a winner in the gene pool, or the family lottery. But, we do have free will to make our own decisions, and we can really change if we decide to.

However, if worse comes to worse, folks found with a negatively popular last name who are trying to do right, can either legally change their last name in order to separate themselves from a disreputable family, or else just bravely try to set a good example.