Under the Blue Hood

The building in the neighborhood has almost completely been taken down. This can be barely noticed under the blue tarpaulin hiding the work that goes inside and effectively keeping away the dust from the demolition. Now, at the last phase of demolition, they need to take away the car shed. The bad news is that the car shed (almost) shares a load bearing wall with my car shed.

For the last few days I knew that they had made great progress, but had no awareness of how far they had progressed. Now there does exist a chance that there will be damage to the car shed which will result in the initiation of heavy repair work; not to mention thoroughly strained relationships with the neighbor.

With the help of a close aide, I have kept watch on the work for most of today and am informed that the supervisor (again) was not present while the workers (who probably have never been to any school sadly) were sledge-hammering the car shed. I have warned that there will be legal (and more than legal) action taken if they were to attempt anything stupid without proper guidance. Further, the house owner has also been warned that the city municipal authorities will be notified if a single crack shows up.

The reason I revisit this demolition is, people seem to need constant monitoring or would get back to their old ways of doing things. In this case, the old way is irresponsible, clumsy and dangerous to self and others. The owners of the neighboring land have also shown a little less than callous attitude towards addressing this.

They have the most to lose or gain. The more clumsier and uncontrollable their contracted employees; the less the chance of a good "building" and "timely completion" of the work. Worse still is their social image in the neighborhood which already has taken a bit of a fall.

All human beings seem to operate with the ideal that once they are out of sight, no one is watching. That means they have the freedom to break every law (if it were man-made and could be broken) and fall back on every word they gave. In simple words "honor" is a lost word in society. "Honor is what no one can give you and no one can take away." - Rob Roy. People who would rather appear to be something they are not do not hold integrity. By that, their place in society is questionable. Inaction of society too can abet the destruction of society. That is precisely how the society allows people of low (or no) integrity to survive and in some sense prosper degrading society itself.

This problem of a simple building demolition with no consideration to the neighbors is probably nothing in comparison to what people are capable of doing in their own self interests. That would not mean that it is palatable and passable in society. This is just how we add on to society's woes which we finally never get to solve, unless we go "John Woo" style.