1668. Hungry and destitute

Quite frankly Austin didn’t have a clue what to do next. He’d spent his last ten dollars on a ticket in the lottery and he hadn’t won a brass razoo.

To think that he had once been better than comfortably off, and now he was destitute. Penniless. It was all the government’s fault. Taxes. The government’s insatiable greed. They needed money – lots of it – to feed their unremitting desire to support politically correct causes. Let the humans suffer.

Here he was hungry and cold, while the government fat cats wined and dined in the capital city’s fancy restaurants.

It was financial worries that had driven his family apart. Austin and his wife had argued constantly and the arguments were always over money. They say that money is the root of all evil. That’s not true. It’s lack of money that is the root of all evil. Austin’s wife had left him, taking the three kids. She would be better off trying to cope with no stable income than to put up with a moneyless, useless husband. That’s why she took off – and with the car.

Enough is enough. Destitute Austin had learnt in his catechism that stealing wasn’t stealing when one was hungry and destitute. And that’s what he did. He stole. At first it wasn’t much; just a little here and there. But soon it grew into something bigger. It takes a lot of money to feed a gambling addiction.