Above: A dispute over what is a toy and what is not.
Amusing ourselves to death - George Pyle, The Salt Lake Tribune
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." — 1 Corinthians 13:11
That is one verse of the Bible that Utahns, faithful and otherwise, ought to heed. Our childish things — or, more often, our childish ways of playing with adult things — are getting us in a lot of trouble.
For years, one of the most hotly debated arguments in the state, especially in the rural areas, has been between the childish and the responsible over the issue of large, noisy and destructive toys. The long-running dispute is between the federal government and environmental groups on one side and some local officials and off-highway vehicle enthusiasts on the other.
You can listen all day long to the arguments of those who willfully ignore the legal ownership of federal land, who are clueless about the biological truth of the supposed "moonscapes" of land that, like just about every other square foot on the planet, are not lifeless and not independent of the surrounding ecosphere.
No matter what language they use, what laws they quote or principles they try to stand on, every argument they make decodes the same way: "We wanna play with our toys, gol durn it." [Read the rest ...]
