People's depravity never ceases to amaze me. You hear of some terrible act of violence or senseless destruction and just when you think mankind (admittedly it's only a few) can't sink any lower, we hear of things such as the kidnapping of hundreds of young girls in Nigeria by a group who disagree with girls being educated but obviously are okay with keeping them as sex slaves. Or the White Supremacist couple in the US who "wished we could have killed more" people who's lifestyle they disagreed with. Yes, one of the people murdered was a sex offender, but there's something drastically wrong in the couple's thinking.
One example of senseless destruction that always makes me furious is harming or defacing something that other people have worked hard on or come to see. I know it's not in any way in the same category as the events listed above, but there is a mural on the side of a building near us that looks like it was painted by schoolchildren, and someone has tagged and obscured it with some illiterate gibberish or another. Why? Was that destruction such a turn on .... for about 30 seconds? It's like the people who delight in putting a scratch on the toe of new shoes on the shelf in a store. Yeah, that makes you real tough.
What got me thinking about all this was a story I read in the UKs Daily Mail newspaper online. It's about the last old growth redwood trees on the west coast, and how they're being severely damaged by people - drug addicts - who are cutting the burls out of the trees to sell for their next fix.
 | |
| Photo from the AP |
We're told that a redwood tree can survive the practice,
but the legacy of the organism that could be 1,000 years old is
threatened, because the burl is where it sprouts a clone before dying.
Sprouting from burls is the prevalent method of redwood propagation, and
the source of the Latin name for coast redwood, Sequoia semper vierens,
or forever living.
You can find more of the story here - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2622071/Drug-addicted-poachers-hacking-hunks-ancient-California-redwoods-sell-valuable-wood.html
One thing I enjoy about online newspapers is that you get the chance to comment on the story - it certainly gives you a sense of how the general public are feeling about things. I particularly liked the comment "Hack parts off those who decimated the trees." I agree.
