Nice Girl, Wrong Place
Henry here. “‘Nice girl’ charged in biker murders,” screams a headline from The Canadian Press. The articles says in part: “The only woman among five people charged in the bizarre shooting deaths of eight bikers was a ‘nice girl’ in the ‘wrong place,’ ‘wrong time’ with the ‘wrong guy’ her former employer said yesterday.”
Nice people should not be expected to get into any kind of trouble. That would be great if it was true but sadly it isn’t. My father, who knew something about the issue, when someone commented how nice someone was, used to say: “The devil is a nice fellow.”
It was his attempt to illustrate to us that just because someone was nice did not mean that they would not rip you of in business, or abuse you in other ways.
That lesson came back to me when I worked as a chaplain in a jail. One inmate always had a joke or interesting comment for me. I genuinely looked forward to meeting him and passing the time. I only later discovered that he was a psychopath who was trying to run his part of the jail.
Psychopaths know exactly what to say to us and can charm us out of our shirts if they wish. That is how come so many people get ripped off in scams. So we can’t always depend on someone actually being nice just because they seem to be “nice”. Many of us have had similar experiences.