Mindless Disrespect

It’s not a new phenomenon, it’s not vandalism particular to nor confined to the Willamette Valley, or even Oregon. It is played out time again on TV, the mechanics of releasing the hounds of Hell and a few ghouls in movies of B grade – C grade and beyond upon the Silver Screen, but knocking over grave stones began years, decades before it ever appeared on any movie screen.

This morning’s front page of the Eugene Register Guard shows beautiful head stones and monuments, in tribute to beloved lost ones, lying in crumbed ruins of the groomed lawn of a historical cemetery. While the stores have been filled with Halloween goodies, ghoulies, and treats for weeks this destruction has nothing to do with the sweet holiday it is equated with. It is all based on selfish need for destruction and disrespect.

Not a believer in funerals per se, I mourn for the families who do, families who lovingly laid their fore bearers to rest under enveloping cool green lawns, shaded by ancient stretching oaks. Resting spaces marked by weather bearing smooth marbles and granites, defaced or destroyed in careless abandon, mindless of the cruelties they wreaked.

Psam and I have spent several afternoons walking the spaces between graves marked or not, noting often the loving care that some graves are tended by family members who hold their past with reverence. Making special note of the names, the dates, the history of those remembered in the space. Walking through the warm sun into the ice cold spots and back again from those who’ve not left. There are cemeteries I love to visit and others where my blood runs cold and I avoid. I have been touched by incredible sadness and other times laughter in cemeteries, but most of all I have been touched by respect and reverence in the moment.

Someday I will pass this plane and wish to be cremated, my ashes cast upon the four winds at the tide line where the waters of the Pacific rush to meet the sand. The end of my days could come tomorrow, next year, or forty years from now, but as certain as the rain will fall my days will end. And I will rest on the wind, in the waters, and in the sands of time. There will be no head stone to knock over, no marble to bear my names, no granite to crumble with the test of time. No totem to knock down.

Funerals are for the living, the dead gone from this plane and do not care, but to deface the resting place of their loved ones memory shows a distinct disrespect for all. Not even a decided disrespect, because that takes fore thought to respect, but a lack of respect total. I can’t imagine the selfishness of parents who are so self-centered, self-absorbed in their own personal pleasures or misery that they fail to teach their children respect. Maybe we should neuter hateful and decidedly ignorant people so they can’t reproduce and spread their disease? It’s a thought, not a viable one, but still a thought. Ducky would tell me I can’t blame their parents, and in some cases that maybe true, I am well aware that peer-pressure is a real and strong persuader, but really parents get with the program.

Restitution and community service working in the cemetery of their destruction digging graves by hand, helping with the final preparation and interment process could be a justifiable punishment… for say three years or more depending on the destruction wrought. Putting back together all those monuments and headstones with super and Gorilla glue should keep their hands and minds busy for quite away. Or as my mom would have said, time for them to think about the outcome of their actions.

Sith,
Cele