OpinionMay 20, 2018
Commentary Rick Rogers
RICK ROGERS
Rick Rogers
Rick Rogers

I've been waiting for a Washington State University or University of Idaho administrator to say something about the April 27 Granite Point vandalism. But if that happened, I missed it. I've been nearly as disappointed with that as I was with the news of the crime itself.

Look, I get it: I was no angel and was once a college freshman myself, drinking nearly every day and going to plenty of alcohol-fueled events. I even got to spend a few nights in jail for being drunk out of my common sense. I know I left my share of Olympia beer containers where they didn't belong. In fact, for decades if I stumbled on an Oly can or bottle, I'd pick it up, because it was likely that I left it there.

However, I am positive that my drinking buddies and I never trashed a public area popular with families. Loud, drunk and boisterous? Absolutely.

But vandalism wasn't a mark of our celebrations.

Reports are the culprits were "about 300" WSU students. None of the miscreants has come forward and 'fessed up, but the reports are "credible allegations," to use the phrase that has put many people in trouble recently.

To their credit, some caring WSU and UI students (who did not participate in making the mess) helped clean the area up after the Army Corps of Engineers had hauled away 800 pounds of garbage. The perpetrators, however, have not yet shown up to take responsibility.

I seriously doubt that any of the culprits will be reading my commentary, but perhaps some administrators (or maybe even some WSU parents) will.

Clearly, those parents and administrators have failed miserably in their duty to impart any sense of personal responsibility to these fools.

So this would be part of my commencement speech to the morons who participated in this travesty:

Dudes and dudettes:

You are a bunch of freakin' morons. Not only are you slobs, but your sense of personal responsibility is completely absent.

You think you have become adults, but you just demonstrated that you belong in the fourth grade.

I know the freshmen among you were just celebrating your freedom from your parents, but vandalism like this just proves that you were kicked out of the nest way too early.

Those among you who thought it was appropriate to break bottles at this family recreation site (where small children routinely run around barefoot) are simple idiots.

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What gives you the right to risk the health and safety of some small kid so you can party like a pig?

To that particular anonymous moron (or perhaps plural morons) who thought it was really a fine demonstration of your manhood to spray-paint graffiti all over Granite Rock: I'm running out of expletives for you.

I know this culprit has to be a boy because a true man wouldn't do this, and it is very rare for girls to spray-paint graffiti on public treasures.

For the girls who were present, your mother taught you not to encourage that kind of behavior, so why did you? Any one of you could have stood up and objected, but you apparently did not.

The rest of us pay for that wonderful university you attend, the Army Corps of Engineers that maintains Granite Point, the people and agencies that provide the roads, emergency medical care and law enforcement that enable you miscreants to do what you did to Granite Point on April 27.

I encourage the county commissioners to place Granite Point completely off-limits to all enrolled WSU students for the entire following school year after incidents like this. In this age of ubiquitous databases, it would be easy to enforce such a rule.

The same prohibition should be levied against the same kinds of lowlifes who vandalize Illia Dunes near Lower Granite Dam in the same way nearly every year.

To those of you who participated in this travesty, I offer you a curse from my generation to yours (with apologies for the edit to writer Neal Merritt and Country Western Star Little Jimmy Dickens):

"May the Bird of Paradise fly up your nose,

May an elephant caress you with his toes,

May your girl be plagued with critics of her pose,

May the Bird of Paradise fly up your nose."

Finally, if any of you know who did the spray painting, I would pay good money to see that person bent over a barbed-wire fence and have his naked ass spray-painted the same colors he sprayed on Granite Point.

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Rogers of Clarkston is a retired manager at CCI-Speer (now Vista Outdoor). His email address is rrogerr76@gmail.com.

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