AMERICANA: Who's Entitled?

• Share

The theory that Americans have moved from an era of rising expectations into an era of rising entitlement—a theory that was all too emphatically affirmed by looters in blacked-out New York City last week—has also been endorsed by a Boston federal judge, no less. When Jane Benduzek, 40, admitted embezzling $84,958 from Boston's South Shore National Bank, where she was a teller, Judge Frank Murray was told that she had felt "entitled" to all that loot. She used much of it to help right such "wrongs'" as the financial setbacks suffered by her brother, who has seven children, and her father, whose pension had evaporated when the milk company he worked for went bankrupt. Mrs. Benduzek also apparently felt entitled to a $6,000 boat, a $12,000 mobile home, a vacation trip to New Hampshire with neighborhood children—which she paid for with the depositors' money—and to $2,000 in losses at the race track when she tried desperately to recoup.

The lady did not go to jail. Judge Murray ordered her to work six hours each week in a Boston hospital for six months. The bank gets the boat, the mobile home—and the problem of how to suppress feelings of entitlement among any other aggrieved employees.