A FILTHY grub stole plants from a garden at Irymple South Primary School this week.
The garden had been designed and researched by a student, who then got her classmates to help with the planting. There was an emotional connection to the garden that this crook robbed from them.
And this is the thing that I despise about thieves — that disregard for any human cost.
Most of us would have been on the receiving end of a robbery at some point in our lives. They are sadly so common that it is uncommon not to have been done over.
My wife and I found a good camera stolen years ago after a thief opened an unlocked window and crept into our home, most likely at a time when we were in another room feeding our first-born baby.
We discovered it missing about 4am when we noticed a window open and a muddy footprint on the carpet. We knew the camera was missing, as we had left it on the bed with the intentions of printing the images the following day.
It was a good camera, but it was the contents that were particularly valuable to us. It included all the hospital images of our baby immediately after she was born.
Insurance can’t replace that sort of stuff.
On another occasion, a brazen thief with a black bag wandered around our backyard mid-afternoon. He was spotted by a neighbour who wasn’t sure if he was a tradie, so didn’t call the police.
He jemmied open a timber-framed window, trashing it so that it had to be completely replaced, requiring the removal of brickwork and rerendering, before entering the house.
He walked out with my father-in-law’s power tools, jewellery, whatever cash may have been lying around, an iPad and even a vacuum cleaner.
He also found a spare set of keys that he took with him, so we had to contact the insurance company and immediately arrange for a locksmith to change all the locks and re-secure the house.
It took many months for everything to return to order.
This is the thing about burglaries. They have impacts on the victims in many ways, sometimes very deeply. They leave you out of pocket and troubled in the mind.
Our courts are overloaded with crooks who take from others.
They have excuses such as drug addictions or troubled backgrounds, but it doesn’t wash with me.
Right and wrong is pretty clear-cut, in my mind.
I understood that growing up in a housing commission estate in a low socioeconomic town. While some have decidedly tougher backgrounds than others, which can admittedly throw off their moral compass at a young age, I still believe we all have choices.
Put simply, stealing from others is a low act. It demonstrates a lack of human decency.
And it’s irrelevant how petty that theft may be.
To me, stealing a few shrubs from kids’ school garden sits in the same category as nicking a wallet, or breaking into someone’s house and taking their belongings, or robbing a builder’s tool trailer, or hot-wiring a car and later dumping it and burning it.
The impact on the victim is always profound.
Sadly, the kids at Irymple South Primary School experienced what that felt like this week. It’s a tough lesson to learn about society.
Let’s just hope we catch and punish the grub.
