How far our culture has fallen.

My wife, daughter, and I are spending the week in Maui. They enjoy time around the pool and beach, and I spend the day chasing native honeycreepers while they're still not extinct.

This morning, our daughter (10 years old) went down to the pool area to claim a cabana for the three of us. She walked over to the pool to check the water, and then returned to find our belongings outside the cabana. Someone in their 20's saw our daughter and asked how many were in our group. Three, she said. This person said there were 12 of them, and they were claiming the cabana.

A couple of quick points:

first - I couldn't be prouder of my daughter. She did the right thing - she walked away without raising a fuss, and she told us. I don't want her to start something that might end up on YouTube.

second - I couldn't be more disappointed that this particular dad wasn't there. I don't want my daughter on YouTube, but me? Pretty sure that encounter would have gone viral. I wouldn't have been violent, but these useless people would be apologizing to my daughter at length.

I work on animals that eat people for a living. Although my feet and knees might not be what they were in years past, my adrenal glands seem to be functioning perfectly well.

But this really highlights why we're living in the times we are. This group of young Americans saw a young girl taking a space they wanted, and they saw no problem with simply taking it. They didn't bother to ask - they just took.

There's always been a selfish streak in American culture. But I've always been tempered by the sentiment in Harry Chapin's "What Made America Famous" - a country filled with people who might disagree fundamentally with all sorts of things, but who nevertheless share a common core of decency and respect.

Maybe it's still out there, but if a group of college kids is willing to bully a 10-year-old girl out of something that isn't actually theirs, maybe not.

I really do worry about the future.

(added on edit - we reported this to the concierge. My concern wasn't just that these people bullied a child - it was that such a group behaving that way would almost certainly be drunk within an hour and, thus, prone to reveal their selfish prickness to everyone else. And this was in the morning. I have no idea if this will make a difference. I went to chase seabirds on the coast this morning, so they were gone by the time I returned.)

(Unrelated, but I finally saw and photographed an i'iwi yesterday!)