Private Property

 

I work as a maintenance technician for a private, religious college here in the Twin Cities. We take care of their commercial buildings and they have about 500 apartments and dormitories for their students that we turn like apartments over the summer while the majority of students have moved out for the summer or due to graduating.

 

I am shocked and saddened at the damage that students do to their rooms. All dormitories, for example, have no smoking policies for pot or cigarettes, but maybe 20% of the students puncture a hole in their window screen to push the cigarette, or smoked marijuana, through to vent the smell and stench outside; this way they can smoke in their rooms, and we have to rescreen those screens that they have destroyed.

 

My older brother is a retired professor and I asked him if the students 50 years ago when he was in college were not more respectful, on average, of the college property, including their rooms, and he said yes.

 

Private property, whether it belongs to a person, a campus, a government entity, or a corporation, belongs to other individuals or to many individuals in joint ownership.

 

If a young person—or anyone—steals, smashes, vandalizes or does graffiti to someone else’s property it is a disrespectful attack on that other person, and that is immoral and sometimes illegal.

 

Young people in America cannot be moral, individualistic, or self-realizers without recapturing and expanding the traditional, general American citizen respect for private property.

 

Any American that throws trash outside or pollutes or rapes the earth—it could be argued--are disrespecting and abusing nature, the property of the Divine Couple, especially our Mother.

 

We should be able to mine the earth and use its resources for our own gain, comfort, and survival, but this also means we should be wise stewards of the earth and reclaim it to the extent possible.

 

To disrespect the private property of others is to attack them, and degrade the self, and that is evil.