Proles Follow Orders, Loot House

In a society whose residents are routinely discouraged from exercising their common sense and who are becoming increasingly afraid to take any initiative for fear of being sued, is the following -- mass looting by "permission" -- really at all surprising?

Someone with cruel intentions placed a fake ad on Craigslist, inviting people to take whatever they wanted for free from a Tacoma home.

Homeowner Laurie Raye says there's little left now of the house. The outside of the home is trashed, the inside is nearly gutted and covered in graffiti. ...

... A phone caller alerted Raye to the destruction. She walked through her garbage strewn front yard to find her house dismantled.

"Including the front door," said Raye. "This used to be a very nice vinyl window here."

From the light fixtures to the hot water heater, everything is gone - including the kitchen sink.

Her neighbors later reported seeing strangers hauling stuff away from her home, seemingly looking for salvage material.

The "ad" was posted on Craigslist last weekend.

"In the ad, it said come and take what you want. Everything is free," said Raye. "Please help yourself to anything on the property."

Not to absolve the person who placed the ad, but....

What kind of mental passivity does it take to believe such an ad? What mean stature to be so ready to believe it? And what low threshold for theft or vandalism to use such an obviously lame excuse to commit a crime?

In a culture transitioning from a norm of personal responsibility to a norm of parasitism, one starts to see a low cunning all over the place. This time, we saw it whenever someone read the ad and calculated that public officials would probably take their claim that they were suckered by the ad at face value, absolving them of all legal responsibility for what they did.

I know this is the Pacific Northwest we're talking about, but let's hope they're wrong.

-- CAV