Revenge

I'm always a little offended when I see it.  Horse drawn plows, manure spreaders, grain drills, wagons, cultivators, etc, parked in someone's front yard for display.  

Sure -- the people who commit such crimes probably don't intend to offend. Some might even share my love of old farm equipment, but are having trouble expressing it in a proper manner. It absolutely kills me to see these things rotting and rusting away for no good reason, particularly the implements which started out in perfectly usable condition when they were parked there in the flowerbed.

Why should it bother me? It's like dancing on the grave of a more noble era. An era in which we had yet to go completely insane, and were less hell-bent on destroying our future for today's fleeting convenience.  An era which we'd do well to emulate rather than memorialize.  It's a burning of the bridge that offers the only route to a future.

Propping up a bit of our past like this seems to say, "Gee, isn't it great we don't have to use those things anymore!?", when we'd be much better off if we still did. Don't these folks understand that our "modern" lifestyles and technology are but a brief blip in the timeline of history that also threaten to end it? Apparently not.  We should look twice before discarding our past into history's waste bin.

I have a revenge planned, to be implemented as soon as I become fabulously wealthy from my dairying habit. I'm taking the biggest, baddest six hundred and twenty horsepower John Deere tractor -- the flagship of diesel fueled, chemically enhanced agriculture -- and I'm parking it in a flower bed. Watching it rust will warm my soul each time I gaze upon it.