If integrity is doing the right thing when nobody is watching, I’d like to have a word with the people who thought it would be hilarious to knock over Pedestal Rock in Cape Kiwanda, a beloved Oregon sandstone formation. They were caught on video doing the dastardly deed, which will hopefully lead to their arrest.
And after that, I’d like to be left alone in a room with the 23-year-old gal who thought it was fine and dandy to scribble her graffiti in acrylic paints over rocks in seven national parks. I’m thinking that sentencing her to 200 hours of community service and telling her she can’t visit any national parks during her two-year probation is perhaps not enough. Yeah, “Creepytings” indeed. She even had the audacity to show off her “work” on Instagram, which led to arousing the internet’s ire and her eventual capture by the feds.
I also have some choice words for the vandals who last spring irreparably damaged the carved granite lions guarding the pavilion at Tacoma’s Chinese Reconciliation Park, smashing their mouths and taking the balls carved inside them. Each lion was carved from a solid piece of granite — including the ball of granite in their mouths. “The technique, the craftsmanship, the beauty of it, you cannot attach a price to it,” Lihuang Wung, a city of Tacoma senior planner who is the project manager for the park, told a reporter at the time. Destroyed. Why? Because someone thought it would be fun.
Who are these people who do these things? How can anyone be filled with this much self-absorption, self-entitlement, and have so little respect and so much inconsideration to destroy beautiful things that belong to all of us? This isn’t rape and it isn’t murder. But this is something that is hideous in its own right. It is wanton destruction for the sake of destruction. It is for the self-pleasure of one at the expense of many.
And it could not be more wrong. Parents and teachers: This is the lesson plan that will shape who we are tomorrow. Let’s get it right.