What kind of fool breaks a tree?

Driving from the house to the local mall today I am struck by how many recently-planted trees have been broken. I counted maybe 9 or 10 in a very small area and I am struck by the sheer pointlessness of this act of breaking young trees.

These trees have been planted in the last few months, in some cases in only the last month, and have been planted along the line of several recently completed new road projects.

They take the raw look off these new roads and new walls and will look really great when they mature in a couple of years.

That is the trees that are given a chance will look great. Those that lie snapped in half, lying on the roadside are finished.

To me this is really sad and the ultimate statement about something, but I'm just not sure what. I mean what kind of person sees a young tree and decides to break it.

Is it some kind of message to society? A reaction to someone feeling trapped by their situation and frustrated with the spending of money on these trees.. not likely in my view. Is it someone with a problem with nature? Equally unlikely I'd wager.

Could it be someone for whom the act of breaking a young tree represents a form of assertion of power? Tenuous I agree but for me this is possibly at the heart of it. A kind of "I break trees because I can" standpoint perhaps, but for me this is a real possibility.

If this is really true then this is really sad, lamentable and pathetic.

It would rank up there with people who feel some kind of gratification from breaking the glass in bus shelters, from spraying their name on a motorway bridge, from carving their initials on the desk in college, or from throwing trash on the street, just because they can.

I can't relate to this mindset, I really really can't.

This seems to close out the loop on the whole theory of broken windows that I have written about before.

If someone breaks a window and nobody fixes it, then quickly another window is broken and another until a bunch of windows are smashed. Ditto for trees so. A young tree is broken and not quickly replaced leading to another and another broken until a whole load of trees are snapped in half in senseless fashion.

The real question for me is whether people regret these acts later. I wrote along a similar vein a few posts back, about whether graffitists feel remorse. Same question here I guess, with maybe the same root motive about tree-breaking/graffiti-spraying.

Is tree-breaking where opportunity meets both stupidity and futility?