I challenge you to remember when you were a kid and your older/younger sibling would wait in hiding and then scare the daylights out of you the moment your guard went down. Remember how it was innocent on their part, but immaculately planned and executed in order to make you, the victim, nearly wet yourself? I remember thinking rather naively that we all grew out of that stage of childhood. Cheap scares and easy amusement are eventually leached out of us through our maturing and growth, right?

Wrong.

I'll be the first to admit that I learned that vital fact long ago. But I came face to face with the fact that underhandedness doesn't leave us, but grows and matures at our sides.

Yesterday, the County Clerk and Recorded for Fremont County of Colorado, Katie Barr, was arrested on charges that included embezzlement of public property, intimidation of witnesses, and fraud.

So what? This happens everyday in the modern world, doesn't it? Not in places like Fremont County, where the largest town has roughly 15,000 residents and a traffic jam consists of a tractor with four cars behind it. I suppose that's what I found so unnerving.

How have we managed, as a species, to allow underhandedness to so deeply permeate our society that we cannot trust those in local, small-town offices? We know these people by name and reputation, yes, but we also know them as members of our close-knit community.

It's no surprise when we hear about D.C.-level politicians, multi-millionaire celebrities and foreign officials getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar. It's nothing new because corruption is so deeply seeded in the glitz and glamour of big-time life that we barely blink an eye anymore.

I take the fact that the County Clerk and Record of my hometown stole nearly $250,000 from my friends, my family and from me very personally. It stirs up a volatile mixture of disbelief and reluctant distrust in the world around me. I don't want to become a cynic because that isn't what I was created to be. I was meant to bring joy and vibrancy to this world that only I as an individual can bring.

I look at the corruption that has unhinged my rural county of Colorado and wonder where it stops. And then come to the unnerving conclusion that there is no end. The corruption that I have so deftly married to household names such as politicians, celebrities and big businesses has quietly trickled down to my center, to my home. And what have I done to stop it? Can I stop it?

I cannot control the government nor the media that have sunken so low as to tout the accomplishments of the underhanded. I've come to the disheartening conclusion that I cannot control my local government even though I never thought I would want to. All I can do is restrain myself from being the grown child that hides in the shadows, waiting for others to drop their guard, so I can attack at the precise moment. I cannot and will not be that person.

Corruption abounds around us but our society has become so numb to it that we have allowed it to trickle into our hearts and into our minds. A diseased mind is the only thing we can hold at fault for diseased actions. Corruption and selfishness is the disease that we accept as normalcy. We must reject disease if we are to defeat it. If accepting corruption is normal, then I want to be the awkward weirdo that distances myself from the crowd.

I could take up arms in this cause, don my battle armor and charge head-long into the fray of betrayal, politics and quick-sand. But quick-sand will always defeat even the most focused of warriors so I must take a different approach, an approach I believe we all must take.

Every person drawing breath on this blue planet has a talent, some skill with which they are born and drawn to do. Mine is the power of the pen. It was the 1800's author Edward Bulwer-Lytton that famously said, "The pen is mightier than the sword" and I believe him. Revolutions, human rights and traditions as old as the world all have had their birth in the written word. Look at the Bible, for example. The Almighty chose the written word as his method to relay ancient events to us because it is concrete and cannot be changed due to human idiocracy.

I, as a member of the modern culture, am part of the linchpin to this world's moral survival or collapse. I will not be part of it's moral decay but will persevere in finding the cure to the disease that is corruption.

We cannot afford to be the generation of children that wait in the shadows for an easy kill. We must grow to be the adults of tomorrow who refuse to accept the new normal. For normalcy will destroy us.