I got to thinking about destruction.
Not the kind of destruction that happens when you’re playing that
maddening game with the sticks that are all neatly piled, then you go
and start pulling them out, the winner being the last lucky fool with
a steady hand to wedge out a stick without the whole damn thing
crashing down and making you look stupid for making such a mess.
Nope, that’s not it. Similarly, I am not talking about the
destruction that has become ubiquitous in today’s society – the
shredder. It seems there are people, whose sole miserable existence
is to preen through bags of trash, who hope to come up with a scrap
of paper whereby some miracle a smidgen of enough personal
information is available to virtually rob those people of identity.
That people even have enough paper that ends in the trash in a mostly
electronic society is a bit shocking. That those shredder bins are
mostly full in the households they exist in is something of a modern
day stunner.
I will admit, in
the bad old days of my misspent youth in the Army one of the neatest
things we were tasked to do was dumpster diving. The concept was to
evaluate a particular unit’s operational security by extracting the
trash from their unit dumpster, then going through it to see how much
unit data could be assembled. Now the smart unit were on to when we
did these ‘inspections’ and would find the nastiest things
imaginable to throw in those garbage bins. Barf bags, long dead
animals, condoms, you name it, they would throw them in there. The
less sharp units, the ones with no grizzled old first sergeants and
lieutenants with shiny new butter bars, those would usually yield
bonanzas which when properly assembled would yield plans for the unit
for the next fiscal year, not to mention upcoming exercises. More
often than not, to avoid embarrassing the units, our grizzled old
first sergeant would pull aside the noncoms from those units and
‘have a word’. No reports, no nonsense, problem fixed. The way it
is done in Armies all over the world.
In any case my mind is on bigger
destruction. I was walking in the woods the other day and came on
this.
(Click to enlarge) |
I realize it’s hard to get the scale
of the thing there, but what you are seeing is two huge trees that a
wind or tornado came through and, on the vagaries of fate, decided to
toss around and make no more. When looking at this the very first
thing that came to my mind was this. You know that old philosophy
question, the one that goes “If a tree falls in the woods, does it
make a sound?” I’m thinking that the guy who though that one up,
was not thinking of these trees. There is just no way you can look at
this awesome destruction and think “Did that make any sound?” No,
the question genuinely doesn't come up does it? More than likely
you are thinking “Man, I bet that made a mighty crash! It would
have scared the pee out of me to be here when that happened!”
I think we tend to be struck by scenes
of destruction mostly because they are evidence of things we just
could not imagine doing ourselves. But there is violence men do that dwarfs all that due to it's sheer godlessness:
Yeah... never forget...
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