Moron Alert

May 1, 2025

People who live around Oberon are generally well behaved and respect each other and each other's property. There is almost no graffiti, crime of any sort doesn't seem to challenge the local police or affect most of us (the idiot who stole the personalised number plates off my car revealed his brain power by driving around with the stolen plates on his car until the computer in a Highway Patrol car detected them), it's safe to walk around the streets at night. There are a lot worse places to live.

This doesn't mean we are totally free of people with the brain capacity of nematodes (but who share some of those organisms' parasitic qualities), and there have been  a few examples of their activities lately.

The photo below shows two trees outside IGA in Oberon Street. The photos were taken a few weeks ago before autumn arrived and caused the leaves to fall off the trees. The reason one of the trees is still green and the other is leafless is because some idiot decided to poison a tree. Usually tree poisoners do it because they believe the trees spoil their views (a continual problem in harbourside suburbs) but that could hardly be the reason here. Some moron just thought it would be fun to kill a tree. Council will now have to remove the dead tree and the bill will be paid by Oberon's ratepayers.

The next example might just be a case of someone being thoughtless rather than a deliberate moronic attempt to damage something, but the result is the same. The crack in the Blue Tree at the Oberon Common was caused by someone swinging on one of the branches. There's a whole playground nearby for this sort of thing. The steel tree is part of the Blue Tree Project to raise awareness of mental illness and has been in the Common since April 2022.

The federal election has brought out those morons who think that their political opinion overrides any concern for others, especially anyone with differing political opinions. At least one local resident has been threatened for displaying a candidate's signs outside his house. (He lives in public housing and the threat was that action would be taken to have him and his family evicted. It was an empty threat because he wasn't breaking any condition of his lease, but it had to cause some concern.)

The real attacks have been on the signs promoting candidates. Andrew Gee had the wheels stolen off a trailer with his signs parked beside a road, and in the last week has had signs along Duckmaloi Road pulled down and thrown into nearby forests. Even more alarming, posters for Kate Hook weren't just pulled down but stakes were driven through the image of her face. Attacks on Sam Farraway's signs seem to be the work of one person with a grudge and a spray can of red paint.

You are allowed to be passionate about politics, but the normal form of protest in Australia is to shout at politicians when they are campaigning, not steal and damage their property or, as in the case of the Kate Hook signs, make what could be considered credible physical threats.

Andrew Gee's signs dumped in a forest. Photo credit Andrew Gee

A very worrying threat. Photo credit ABC

Photo credit Sam Farraway

Come on, folks. We're better than that. And smarter, too.

According to an online dictionary, the word "moron" can mean "a person who is notably stupid or lacking in good judgment" or "a person of borderline intelligence having an intelligence quotient of 50 to 69". Apparently the second of these is no longer used because it might be offensive.

Are these morons offended by being called "morons"? Too bad if they are. There's that old cliché about caps that fit.

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