Archive for September 15th, 2007
Hippy trees. What environmental groups could never achieve.
It seems to me that with the discovery of Monkey God residing currently at a tree in Jurong West, there has been the rise in fame of that particular roadside tree, to the point of traffic jams, crowds of 200 peeps thronging it and giving offerings to it. I also happened to observe that although so many trees in some ulu forest in China or India or Brazil has been chopped down daily, and some of them possibly having beautiful carvings or eve older than three generations of family, no one seems to care about them.
During Christmas, we have the highly cliche yet well loved, Christmas tree.
We also have the not so cliche, spectacular, yet not very fascinating mega Christmas tree at Takashimaya.
And we also have very ancient, rare and unknown thousand year old trees.
But yet, the humble and pious people of Singapore, with their vivid imaginations and the need to strike lottery, decided that this tree was the most valuable of them all.
This is what environmental protection failed to achieve. To get trees god-like status, to get trees offerings to keep them from getting chopped, and also to get the people’s worship. I’m telling you all, if all it needs is a carving of a god to make people treat the tree as sacred, why not do it to all endangered trees and trees that are under severe threat of getting chopped? Think of it this way, no one would dare to show disrespect to someone’s religious idol unless he is a masochist.
However, I would like to caution everyone out there who ever reads this blog: Not every stump on a tree resembles a religious idol. If the stump is nice, the god might bless you. If the stump is one ugly thing, good luck to you.
