I’m running late today because I had to hit the road with my bike before I sat down to breakfast, so as to beat the rain.
As I pedaled through what’s supposed to be a quiet residential neighborhood, I saw one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen in my life.
All over town, they’re tearing down nice, ordinary houses that nice, ordinary people actually lived in, to replace them with these huge plywood mansions on undersized lots, whose inhabitants never show themselves.
So this morning they were tearing off the top half of a house. Everything was gone–roof, inner walls, framework–except the two walls at opposite ends of the house, standing like bare bookends. And then one of those walls started to wobble back and forth.
Oh! The workmen were trying to push it over. By and by, they succeeded. The wall came down with a great crash. Who cared where the splinters were going to fly off to? They might have wrecked a car, or taken off somebody’s leg, but the jolly workmen up above never thought of that.
Another thing they never thought of–the falling wall took down a nearby power line. Or maybe it was a phone line. Somebody’s going to be put through quite a hassle here.
Idiots should not be paid for demolishing a house.
Reminds me of what the ‘progressive’ hobbits were doing to the Shire when Frodo and Co. came back after destroying the Ring. It always made me sad to read about the Party Tree being cut down, especially since Tolkien said that it was based on what happened in his boyhood, when English villages were overtaken by industrial ugliness.
Well, we are living in the age of insanity, you know. When you can’t even make a company rep understand what you are saying to them in English, we know we are in trouble. I turn aside to the Scriptures when my nerves have had it- they are the only comfort sometimes. Bike riding is good, too.
In the City of Buffalo, NY a couple of years ago, the mayor stood smiling for the cameras while many run-down houses were demolished. Part of a beautification project. But while he stood there smiling, walls came tumbling down spewing asbestos and lead into the air for miles. No one ever brought it up.