The work of hateful cowards

This item came up in my Facebook feed. Spring seems to have brought out the haters on both sides of the Atlantic:

http://road.cc/content/news/182405-barbed-wire-booby-trap-found-kent-cycle-trail

Tacks on a trail could be considered mischief. Most likely, they will only cause a rider inconvenience rather than bodily harm. But barbed wire strung across a trail is a premeditated assault on the rider, not just sabotage of the machine.

Traps are the work of cowards. Trappers may set them out of contempt, but they are also avoiding any confrontation or accounting for the harm they might cause.

Our species produces a certain percentage of damaged people who like to inflict pain. An even larger pool justifies acts of aggression -- even passive aggression -- because the targets of the aggression have aggrieved them in some way. In most cases, you can't settle things with a fight, because you can't kill a mindset. At best you can hope to educate someone out of one. Even then, sickos remain sickos.

As population density increases, we all get on each other's nerves. Whether we're really headed down the drain of the behavioral sink is still debated in the scientific community. The higher intellect of humans at least slows the process of total degeneration by keeping notions of conscience alive in a large percentage of us. That still does not protect us from the less-evolved types who think hunting each other is a fun and effective way to solve their problems.

The joker with the barbed wire should be tangled in a length of it and rolled down a bumpy slope, just for educational purposes. Or we just wait to see what karma comes up with on its own. It's always tempting to intervene and try to speed up the process.

The first priority is always to avoid the traps and cheat the cowards of their fun. If you can get it to blow back on them, that's a bonus. If you put too much thought and energy into it, you become part of the problem yourself.