Georgia Guidestones? They've been Talibanned.

Getting to all 50 states is sort of on my bucket list. Or would be there if I actually had a bucket list. I don't have many states left to go: Kentucky, Tennessee, North Dakota, Alaska. And I may actually be able to check Kentucky off, as I did fly into Cincinnati's airport, which is actually in Kentucky, so I've been on the ground there. (I can't count Tennessee, as my only time spent there was a plane change in Memphis.) North Dakota is probably the most problematic state on here, as there's really no reason to go there. Tennessee has Nashville; Alaska has Alaska. North Dakota? Bismarck? Fargo? But. I. Digress.

Because we're talking about Georgia here, and I've been. To Atlanta a few times, and through the state on the tale-end of a cross country road trip fifty years ago. 

Admittedly, I haven't seen everything there is to see in Georgia. I never got to Stone Mountain, where Confederacy heroes Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis are memorialized. Not much of an attraction for me. 

I'm sorry I've never been to Savannah. While I don't need it to check off a state I've already been to, if I did have a long bucket list, Savannah might be on it. 

Not a golfer, so Augusta National: meh.

And until some American Taliban blew it up last month, I'd never even heard of the Georgia Guidestones. (Not to be confused with the Righteous Gemstones.)

The Guidestones are a set of "granite monoliths inscribed with cryptic messages" that were erected in a rural area of Georgia in 1980, and became something of a tourist attraction.

The group that paid for the Guidestones' creation remains anonymous. 

The Guidestones’ funders wanted to make “a moralistic appeal” to humanity, according to the trade group, and etched 10 guiding principles onto the stones. The multilingual manual for humanity has been a popular spot for visitors over the past four decades. (Source: Washington Post)

Their "moralistic appeal" is/was a combination of anodyne and weird. (Source for this list: Wikipedia)

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the Earth – Leave room for nature.

To cover at least some of the linguistic bases, the list is multi-lingual, with the guidelines repeated in English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian. 

Not much to argue with for most of the items on the list. What's not to like about fair laws and avoiding useless officials? Who'd be against prizing truth, beauty, and love? Be not a cancer on the Earth? Amen to that.

Others are on the weird side.

A living new language? Like Esperanto?

And what did the anonymous group - the Guidestoners -  intend to do to get to a balanced world population of 500,000,000, given that when the Guidestones were erected in 1980 the world pop was over 4 billion (and is now nearly double that)? Were they going to let not-so-petty laws and officials cull the global herd?

Whatever the Guidestones meant, they are no more.

Parties unknown set off an explosive device there, and the damage was so severe that they had to take the whole thing down.

The detonators may not (yet) be known, but the smart money's on "right-wing conspiracy theorists such as Infowars founder Alex Jones [who] have seized on the edicts as proof of a nefarious globalist scheme."

According to Jones, the Guidestones show that global elites are out there figuring out how to "enslave most of the world." Some "theorists" associate the Guideposts with the emergence of COVID. No surprise that Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) has her own conspiracy theories about the Guideposts: population control brought about by lefty extremists. And general spew about the evils of globalism. 

Other righties have dubbed the Guidestones 'satanic', part of the "Luciferian Cabal" out to grip the world in its clutches. 

And the bombing? Forget bombers. It just might be an act of God.

Nah. I'm guessing right-wing crazies. The loss to the world of this monument is, of course, not as great as the loss of the ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan that the Taliban destroyed a couple of decades back. Still, if a monument's going to go, I'd put the carvings of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis ahead of the goofy Georgia Guideposts.

And as a right-wing nutter action, bombing the Guideposts sure beats the stochastic terrorism of someone mowing down innocent Fourth of July paradegoers in Highland Park, Illinois.

In any case, the Georgia Guideposts are no more. Not that I was ever going to pay a visit to Elberton, Georgia, to see them. So no skin off the nose of my imaginary bucket list. 

Still, the bombing was a stupid and disturbing event. 

We need less of this, not more.