Sanctimonious Vandalism

A few months ago, I blogged an incident in which numerous people took a Craig's List advertisement as sufficient excuse to steal property from and vandalize a house.

Today, I have read about an incident which is even worse in some respects -- the open and widespread approval by his neighbors of the destruction of a man's new vehicle by environmentalist vandals:

On a narrow, leafy street in Northwest Washington, where Prius hybrid cars and Volvos are the norm, one man bought a flashy gray Hummer that was too massive to fit in his garage.

So he parked the seven-foot-tall behemoth on the street in front of his house and smiled politely when his eco-friendly neighbors looked on in disapproval at his "dream car."

It lasted five days on the street before two masked men took a bat to every window, a knife to each 38-inch tire and scratched into the body: "FOR THE ENVIRON."

...

[A]s [Gareth] Groves ponders what to do with the remains of his $38,000 SUV, he has been the target of a number of people who have driven by the crime scene in his upscale neighborhood and glared at him in smug satisfaction. [link dropped]

It is little wonder that followers of a movement that damns man for the sin of exercising his natural ability to alter the environment would have so little concern for something integral to someone's ability to do so, namely the protection of his property rights. Fortunately, a few embers of the Enlightenment still glow: at least one Greenish neighbor who disapproved of the Hummer incident was decent enough to be upset by it.

The Craig's List looters, at least, did not take the event of their own barbarity as an occasion for moral preening. In that respect, at least, they are somewhat more decent than those who sympathized with the ecoterrorists: At least they knew on some level to be ashamed of themselves. And I suspect that somehow, the looters didn't exactly congratulate each other during or after the festivities -- or leer at the victim for days afterwards.

-- CAV