[wdfifteen]

Another local landmark has bitten the dust at the hands of hateful people.

At the edge of the small city near me, at an intersection on the route home, a man put a big chalkboard up on the side of his house. Every day he would write some affirmation or pithy saying on it. Sort of a thought for the day. This has been going on since the 1970s, and I always looked forward to driving by and seeing what the guy had to say. The last one I remember was, "A ship is safe in the harbor, but that's not what ships are for." Over the past year vandals started spray painting obscenities on the guy's board, and every time he'd clean it up and put up another saying. Today I drove by and the board was gone. He painted "I quit" on the side of the house where the board was.

For decades there was this fence post out in the country near here. It was on the inside of a very sharp curve on a little 1 1/2 lane country road. You could almost reach out and touch it from your car. Decades ago for unknown reasons anonymous people started decorating the post. Over the years there was every kind of stuff on it. Some clever, some just junk - I remember a Hawaiian lei, a toilet seat screwed to it, someone knitted a sweater for it, some nails driven in it with wine bottles on them, pictures, etc. I used to go out of my way to drive past just to see what someone had left there lately. A few years ago someone set it on fire. It got back to normal (although charred) for a while, then they started setting it on fire regularly. A couple of years ago they burned it to the ground. Someone put a little cross out for it and the ashhole even knocked that over.

There was a rustic old swinging bridge across a creek near here. It was 40 feet long and 10 feet above the water, just two cables stretched between trees with planks laid across them, with a cable handrail. Marriage proposals were made there, lots of romantic evenings spent sitting on the swinging bridge, I can personally attest to some illicit activity involving a girl from the local college that took place in the moonlight on that bridge. So some jackass started sawing through the cable. It got put back up once and was cut down again. The people who owned it decided not to replace it.

Is the world really getting coarser, angrier and less respectful, or am I just turning into an old curmudgeon?