Doing the Right Thing

Mitch Gilbert was in the Las Vegas airport, about to catch a plane back to his home state of Colorado, when he found two envelopes from Caesar's Palace. Each envelope contained $5,000 in cash. Gilbert says that he knew right away that he was not going to keep the cash, though he could have used it to pay bills. Instead he set out to find the rightful owner and return the money.

The only trouble was that the folks at the Las Vegas airport simply were not going to cooperate. The officials cited confidentiality and acted like they simply didn't want to get involved. Gilbert, however, just wasn't having any of that. He persisted and kept calling the airport, trying to find someone who would share information with him.

Finally, he talked to a female employee who told him that a man had reported losing two envelopes of cash, and the envelopes were from Caesar's Palace. Gilbert then made contact with Ignacio Marques, of El Paso, TX, and arranged to return the entire amount to him. As you can imagine, Mr. Marques was astounded.

The lesson here may be that we spend too much time considering professional politicians, who are busy stuffing other people's money into their pockets. And we certainly are conscious of the criminals in our society who are out to take anything of value that belongs to others. So please just take a minute to reflect on Mitch Gilbert—a man who knew what the right thing was and did it.

That's the kind of character America was founded on.