Why so much vandalism and senseless destruction?

I have always hated vandalism. I remember as a young kid being appalled by one of the kids I hung out with breaking a pane of glass in the window of an old, semi abandoned garage, and trying to stop him.

What are we to make of the proliferation of really large scale senseless destruction that seems to grow more common every year, like these idiots who shot up the big transformers at an electrical substation up in Washington, draining huge amounts of toxic oil onto the ground until the equipment failed, cutting off power to thousands of people, just to facilitate the robbery of one little grocery store?

It must be that more and more people just don't feel that they have any stake in anything; their neighborhood, their state, society in general.

Why is that? Could it be that the political reality these days, especially here in the USA, really does not even pretend any more to seek input from or do anything for the regular people who populate our country, unless they happened to be amongst the very wealthy who might make political contributions? The manufacture of man-made goods inevitably exacts a price from the earth; the production of steel, concrete and every other material used in the creation and maintenance of modern human society is slowly, steadily, fouling humanity's nest, bringing on climate change, sea level rise and the gradual choking off of the earth's ability to provide the essentials of life to its evergrowing human population.

There are few things more disturbing to me than seeing dozens of brand-new 25 story concrete residential buildings being explosively demolished in China just after all the concrete was placed, or the bizarre waste of concrete by this madman `artist' Heiser, who I guess just finished squandering his significant inherited wealth pouring gigantic, function free concrete `works of art' in the middle of the Nevada desert on his property next door to Area 51. I guess he went through $40 million over 50 years creating his colossal monument to wretched excess at the end of a bumpy dirt road in the middle of nowhere.

Call me a Philistine, but all I would be able to think about, were I to visit it, would be its impact on the environment.

Of course galling examples such as these, the sickening trashing of our shared earth environment pale in comparison to the orders of magnitude greater destruction and the creation of human misery that seems to be a constant of US foreign policy; it's apparent dependence on making war one place or another as the bedrock of our nation's economy.

The scale of destruction currently taking place in Ukraine, the suffering and misery of the people there, it seems to me, is being intensified and prolonged by the nonstop propaganda about the issue that is being pushed by virtually every news source, from NPR to Fox News.

From the immediate and unanimous condemnation of Russia for its `unprovoked' attack, even though any objective observer who knew anything about the area's recent history, would know about the many years of severe provocations, from immediately blowing off our promise to Russia, as they were negotiating the end of the Soviet Union, that we would not expand NATO `1 foot' beyond the

reunited Germany, to the blatant meddling in their national affairs to facilitate a coup to replace their Russia-friendly democratically elected leader with one more inclined to play ball with NATO and the West. One can only imagine the reaction here if Russia or China were to foment a coup in Mexico in order to give them the ability to build bases and missile installations along our southern border.

Of course, the most outrageous act of war has to be the wanton destruction of Russia and Germany's $12 billion Nordstream 2 gas pipeline; this colossal feat of human engineering, two approximately 3 foot diameter very thick steel pipes, each encased in enough concrete to make them sink in water, running for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea, were just being finished when, according to the never-beenwrong-on-a-major-story Seymour Hersh revealed what had already been obvious to any semi informed observer, that indeed, the US military, probably with

Norwegian connivance, placed large charges of C-4 explosives on the Nordstream 2 and one of the older Nordstream pipelines during military exercises in the area months before the explosions, triggered at our leisure with a buoy which would send out an audio signal to them.

This abundant Russian natural gas was to power the economic workhorse of the EU, Germany, with its tremendous industrial productive capacity. These pipelines were no joke; I was blown away to read that even though they were complete but not being used because of US pressure over boycotting Russia due to its invasion of Ukraine, it had been pressurized to an incredible 3200 psi to ensure that they would not be crushed under the enormous water pressure they were under. Talk about a colossal investment of materials and its impact on the environment! Who knows if the pipelines can even be repaired; $12 billion worth of ecological impact on our fragile planet, turned to trash, or as one US official said, “so much scrap metal on the ocean floor”.

My God, can you imagine how we would react if say, the Russians were to bomb the Alaskan oil pipeline somewhere out in the frozen tundra? At least there it could probably be repaired, but it would probably make seven dollar a gallon gasoline seem like a fond memory of cheap fuel for a long time until it was fixed.

Who asked the American voter if this was something they want to sign on to? No one. No wonder an ethos of every man for himself seems to have taken over our once much more united country!