It’s one thing not to share someone’s fascination with a particular hobby. It’s another thing entirely to piss all over something they obviously find very important or get a lot of joy out of after they’ve spent massive amounts of time and money on it. People like that make me sick. How would Counter-Strike Boy feel if you snuck into his room and snipped all his power cables? His attitude would change quickly, I’m sure.
I stand to inherit a highly expensive classic car in the next couple of decades. If it got vandalized, it would be damn unlikely I’d have the werewithal to get it fixed. Just because someone drives a nice car doesn’t mean they can afford a nice car. Anyway, there’s a huge difference in how a car owner is affected by vandalism if they’ve spent massive amounts of time and extra money restoring/modifying/improving it, and they didn’t just buy it and keep it stock. It’s not about how nice the car is, it’s about how much that person has invested–in non-financial senses of the word–in it.
Something that pisses me off more than anything is that people don’t seem to care about vandalism. In the town my parents live in, there is a bar about a block from our hourse. The following happened several times while I was in high school…
Guy goes to bar to watch ball game, he gets drunk and his team loses or he gets in a fight. He then walks down the street that we park our cars on (down from the bar and into a residential area) and slashes every roadside tire for blocks. The worst part is, the police can be called about it while it is going on, and they refuse to do anything other than come by and write a report, but they won’t drive up the block and stop the guy from doing it again. I bought 4 tires in the year I lived there with my car. Yeah, that sucks…
Worse is that my mother is a teacher in that town, or a librarian at a high school now, and kids hate her sometimes. Of course, she stands by her word that she only enforces the rules, and when I’ve been to work with her, this seems true, but I know that for the past 3 months, at least 2 times a week, her car has been coated with egg. It’s not anything special, a Ford Focus, but my father’s vehicles are special. He has a highly modified F150, a very nice Jeep Wrangler, and now - the MG is sitting at his huose instead of his farmhouse because he needed room in the garage up there. I know that one of these times these teenagers decide to “get back” at my mom for making them do something at school, they will end up hurting one of these other cars…
It is sad, no matter the car. Vandalizing a car is just a crappy (and usually cowardly) thing to do.
My dad is a motorhead and he has always taken particular car of his cars, even the seemingly crappy ones. Right now he has a '31 Plymouth he’s just finished restoring and, I shudder to think what would happen if he ever caught someone tampering with it. He’s 70 years old and can no longer make a fist, but I’m sure he’d get hurt trying to bust the vandal’s head.
I kind of set aside people who key or damage a car to get back at the owner, BTW. They are assholes, too, but assholes of a different measure.
The creeps who really get me are the ones who damage a stranger’s car just because they can tell that the owner has taken pains with it. The classic car in the OP may have been such an incident. I’ve been a victim of this myself. I don’t have a classic car – just a PT Cruiser that I’ve put some silly little cosmetic modifications on. One of those modifications is smoothie wheels with baby moon hubcaps. Twice I’ve found one of my baby moons kicked in. It makes me mad and it – and I realize this is stupid, mind you – hurts my feelings. Ruins my whole week.
The phrase candy-ass comes to mind. If I fucked up a person’s painstakingly maintained anything, it would be as a gesture of visceral disgust that anyone would spend their time and money on it.
Just sayin’. I hate vandalism, and if I saw someone else doing it, I’d report the living shit out ot 'em.
I have a 2004 Liberty. My husband has a '73 Mustang convertible. We’d both greatly prefer if they keyed the Mustang rather than the Jeep. Not only is the Mustang paid off, but it needs a new paint job anyway.
If someone slashed the top, on the other hand, that’d be bad.
If you park your car in the “Fire Lane, No Parking, Tow-Away Zone” at the grocery store because you are too important to be bothered with parking where the regular folks park, your car might very well be keyed. And rightly.
WHo knows what the back story here is. Maybe she slept with his borther and then destroyed something he cared deeply about, who knows. Generally of course keying a car is bad, but are people upset because the car is an “innocent” victim in this dispute? Or are they upset because the victim was, well, victimized?
Maybe the LeSabre owner thought so highly of their car that they thought it would be okay to take up two parking spots in a busy parking lot so their doors wouldn’t get dinged?
People with really nice cars should be allowed to do that and most vandals would agree.
In Virginia, motor scooters do not require a license to operate on public streets, but you may not operate one on public streets if you have a license and it is suspended or revoked.
No, not rightly. It is never right to vadalize someone’s property, no matter how much of an asshole they are being. Go ahead and report them to the police, have the store tow the car, etc. But you don’t get to damage someone’s property just because they offend your delicate sensibilities or produce a welling of moral outrage in your breast.
Someone took a pair of scissors and snipped one of the two strands of Christmas lights on my front fence. These are the LED kind too, not the cheapo kind.
Merry Christmas. :mad:
My father once owned a '63 Buick LeSabre (tan, black top) and it was the only semi-cool car he ever had. The model had settled deeply into ordinary by '68.
Now my uncle’s '55 cream-colored Buick Special with the big portholes - that was cool.
Oh, yeah. Keying a car = Bad.
Could’ve been worse: he could have carved his name into the leather seats, took a Louisville slugger to both headlights, slashed a hole in all four tires…
See? Be thankful at least there’s no insipid pop culture opus presenting these sorts of things as normal and justified reactions.
Your solutions have the disadvantage of not being practical. Mainly because they don’t work.
As to whether I “get” to do anything at all, I submit that I “get” to do whatever I want, as long as I am willing to accept the consequences. I certainly don’t see your protestations as much of a hindrance to my behavior.
If you are blocking a fire lane you deserve what is coming to you. You have lost whatever moral ground you might have had. You have no complaint. You have no standing. You have declared that your convenience trumps the safety of others; a claim that is insufferably arrogant and unhumane. A keyed car is getting off lightly.
I hate that someone ruined that beautiful car, don’t get me wrong, but it it was a five year old Taurus and the driver stole a parking spot in a shopping mall during Xmas or was able bodied and parked in a handicapped spot, there would be some who would be cheering this. I’d love to know that backstory.
:shrug: OK, fine with me. There are people out there who will protect their property with deadly force, and as long as you are willing to accept the consequences, then who cares?
I guess I was under the impression that we lived in a society of laws, but I guess ol’ Contrapuntal is out there on the frontier, livin’ by his gun and his guts. :rolleyes: