Everything I needed to know about life ...

By now, my colleagues and likely some of the police officers I bump into from time to time are probably sick of my affinity for Sesame Street.

Yeah, I know I'm way too old to be talking about the PBS kids' show and in actuality it's been years since I came across it on television.

To give you some indication of my age, I watched the show religiously back when "Mr. Hooper" was still running the corner store/soda shop on Sesame Street and everyone on the fictional street thought "Snuffleupagus" was nothing but a figment of "Big Bird's" imagination.

Why I talk about the show to this day, to get back on my traditionally wandering track, has a lot to do with the educational value and the messages it tried to impart.

Sure, the show offered the basics like counting (in both English and Spanish), the alphabet, and spelling. But there was so much more.

Likely, some of you have come across a poem — often found in chain e-mails — from time to time entitled "Everything I needed to know about life I learned from Sesame Street."

I don't know who wrote it, and it likely was just a variation of similar poems about kindergarten, but the messages still are the same. On Sesame Street, you learned things like:

Be kind to others. Share what you have with others. Don't hit others. Don't take things that don't belong to you.

Don't lie.

These are messages readily found in other educational works, most notably in the form of the Ten Commandments. Sesame Street wasn't a religious show, but some lessons do cross over into the secular world.

So it is when I come across situations that defy these perfectly obvious truisms that I like to say someone mustn't have watched Sesame Street when they were a kid.

And unfortunately, I find myself saying it more and more each day.

Just before Christmas, I was shopping in Belk when I heard a store employee yell "Stop" and the alarm started blaring. The employee wasn't yelling at me, but at a woman running out the door with armfuls of clothing she, or anyone else for that matter, hadn't paid for. The clothing, as far as I could tell, was dumped in the parking lot as the woman made her getaway.

She obviously did not watch Sesame Street as a child.

The crack security staff at Wal-Mart could likely be saying the same thing as me.

I've come across police reports about dozens of people caught shoplifting there over the past year. Most of the people caught, it appears, seem only a few short years removed from their Sesame Street days.

(A word to the wise, the security staff at Wal-Mart is really good at what it does. Save yourself the embarrassment of getting caught by paying for your purchases. Besides, getting caught gets you permanently banned from every Wal-Mart in the United States!)

Then there are the dozens of police reports I've seen throughout the past year where arrests are made for spousal abuse. I don't often write about them, so as to protect the identity of spouses who deserve better in life, but they serve as constant reminders that lessons taught on Sesame Street to pre-schoolers might have made someone pause before raising a hand in anger.

I actually did a term paper for a mass communications course in college about the cultural impacts of Sesame Street on race relations. You know why all the "monsters" in Sesame Street come in different colors? I may be boiling this down too much, but it's so children don't judge things based on color.

You name the topic, and the creators of Sesame Street and their advisors — which includes a band of child psychologists — have likely tackled it in a way that allowed young minds to relate.

Then again, maybe there is one topic they'll have to revisit, or at least be more specific about. Leading up to the Christmas holiday, I couldn't help but notice page after page after page in the police reports detailing break-ins of storage sheds. There's likely a couple dozen stolen lawn mowers, weed whackers and leaf blowers floating around in Cherokee County's illicit lawn equipment market at the moment, either that or police might want to investigate Cherokee County's most perfectly manicured lawns.

I don't think they specifically addressed "weed whackers" on Sesame Street. But, truthfully, if you watched the show, you readily could surmise that stealing them is frowned upon.

Some lessons never go out of style, I guess.

Although the newspaper publishing schedule means this is a day late, Happy New Year everyone. My best wishes to all for a good 2009; that sunny days sweep the clouds away and the air is sweet.