About a month ago, I went grocery shopping with my daughter. As I went to return my cart, I saw a package of juice boxes on the bottom of the cart and realized I’d forgotten to pay for them. I was horrified. I dragged my daughter back into the store with me, lecturing all the way about how important it was to do the right thing and go back inside to pay for the item. I felt very good about using my mistake as a morality lesson for my daughter (former teachers never quite go gently into that good night).

But this afternoon, I was out shopping alone. The woman ahead of me at the checkout line had a toddler in the cart. I watched him playing with various items his mother was placing on the belt. As she swiped her card to pay for her purchases, her little one dropped a toy. When I bent down to pick it up for him, I saw that there was a package of raisins under her cart. Remembering how mortified I’d been by my own accidental brush with “shoplifting”, I alerted the woman to the item still hiding under her cart (oh, stop–I can hear the epithets now: “busybody”, “buttinski”, and some other unprintable ones–I am a compulsive “goody goody”, as my middle son would say, so deal with it.)

But the look the mother sent me was anything but pleased. I began to wonder if it was due solely to her thinking I was being a horrible Nosey Parker, or if there was something deeper to that flash of something dark in her eyes. I wondered: What if that was not the action of an absent-minded parent momentarily distracted by a child? What if the action was a deliberate one? What if this woman was a single parent, without a job, without support? What if she was desperately fighting to keep her child fed and clothed, and couldn’t afford to pay for that package of raisins, or for anything else in her cart for that matter? A month ago, I wouldn’t have asked myself those questions; I would have assumed I was doing the right thing.

Maybe it’s the ever-worsening economic tidings; maybe it’s having friends and family being affected by work slowdowns and layoffs. Maybe it was tuning in to watch the Academy Awards last night, that ultimate self-congratulatory Feast of the Haves entertaining the worldwide audience of Have-Nots; maybe it was the hangover effect of wondering if all those celebrities couldn’t have donated food items to local food pantries in return for borrowing jewels from Harry Winston, or if they couldn’t have had designers and celebrities make charitable donations equal to the cost of each of their exquisite gowns in return for displaying them on the red carpet. But suddenly, there at the grocery counter, I found  myself questioning what was right and what was wrong.

Maybe, after all, it was just the dirty look the mom in the store shot me. But whatever the cause, the end result was that I was no longer certain anymore that pointing out the hidden item about to walk out of the store was the right thing for me to do. I feel like my moral compass has been shaken a bit. I believe that that will be another bit of fallout from these economic before-during-and-aftershocks: the feeling that the entire world has shifted around you from a place where everything is pristinely black and white to a place where there are only shades of grey. And we’ve already seen what destruction a world governed by moral elasticity can wreak.

For me, I fervently hope for a time  when we can safely return to a world of moral clarity; without it, we will all be lost.