People like to say that morals grow out of human nature but they are wrong. Morals are agreed upon constraints on human nature. There are certain human traits like mothers protecting their young and the fight or flight response that contribute to these agreed upon mores but mostly it was trial and error. Certainly religion played a big role in deciding what would or would not be moral behavior. With the growth of secularism many of these religious based mores are being discarded in certain parts of the several societies that now exist in the U.S.
Sometimes there are just mean-spirited people. Two weeks ago someone cut the fence on my neighbors property and stole his chickens. Now to do this they had to go down a relatively steep hill, wade across a three foot deep creek and then retrace their route and climb the hill with the chickens in a bag. The previous owner of the property was having his cows shot in the head with a .22. We have a pull over near the creek that is often used by drug dealers to service their clients and last Thursday the sign in front of my farm was stolen. It was one of those two-sided laser cut signs and had an image of a black dog with a red collar and a spy in a trench coat and fedora holding a magnifying glass. It was a reproduction of a steel statuary I commissioned a few years ago that sits at the top of one of my flower gardens. It is life-size and I’d like to see someone try to steal it. Oh, the statuary is titled “The Mole Hunters” since Tailwagger Jack was always digging up mole and I was for many years a counterintelligence officer. Double meaning as it were.
Nonetheless, there is nothing the thief can do with the sign. He can’t display it unless he does so in private, so my guess is this is just malicious vandalism on the part of someone who needs to learn how to behave. But the problem is the thief has learned how to behave. He behaves as the new societal norms allow him to. In our county most of the crimes are committed by people who are either on parole or out on bail. Many of them are out on bail for more than one crime.
I will replace the sign and install motion sensors, spotlight and cameras although they will also become the target of the malicious vandals. My neighbors and I will be putting up cameras along the road and at the pull over by the creek. My grandfather’s solution for poachers and thieves was a twelve gauge with rock salt in the shells. Would that I could do the same but the first gate where the sign is installed is eighteen hundred feet from my house and honestly my shoulder won’t take the recoil of a 12 bore any longer. Still, I might be tempted to use a 20 gauge.
There’s a lot more to be said about the return to behavioral patterns of the past but this is enough for now.