Sign of the Times: Misplaced Priorities

Living in the San Francisco Bay area is a surrealistic experience, and the looniness of the more extreme denizens could take up most of the space here at SHS. Two local controversies have involved whether to put suicide barriers on the Golden Gate Bridge and another is the coddling of tree-sitting protesters who are trying to prevent a small grove of oaks from being cut down in order to build a UC Berkeley athletic center. The difference between the fervor of the tree protesters—which UC Berkeley in its time-tested pattern has utterly coddled—and the public attention to the GGB issue, caught one letter writer’s attention in today’s SF Chronicle:

There are a lot of misplaced priorities in today’s society. Some, in my view, come from rejecting human exceptionalism. When we personalize fauna and flora, we diminish the intrinsic importance of human life. And that plays out in many ways, both big, and as here, small, in the misplaced priorities about which the letter writer is so concerned.