INVASIVE INCIVILITY

Graffiti and Kudzu, Jamestown, NC

INDEPENDENCE DAY 2020

I was returning home from my traditional Saturday morning drive to nowhere in particular with my coffee container on empty.  I use these weekly morning drives to clear my head, seek inspiration and sort out recent events.  And this year the drive is even more appreciated in this unprecedented time of an extended pandemic lockdown amid protests and too many destructive riots.  Rioting that has included the destruction of historical statues and many small businesses across our major cities.  I’ve watched this unrest unfold with disdain, sadness and a growing concern for the lawlessness and incivility that it birthed in my country, America.  I watched in disbelief as mayors and governors obviously had our law enforcement stand down and let criminals destroy fellow citizens’ lives.

Yes, there has always been a certain irony and concern about our founding fathers who declared independence from a taxing foreign power 244 years ago, while many were slave owners themselves.  Slavery has been with humanity for all time and still exists in many facets as a serious social issue.  Some later freed those slaves and hundreds of thousands died in a civil war to grant all people freedom.  However, simply reversing a social wrong may be a good start but it generally doesn’t alleviate the problem.  Martin Luther King, Jr. studied history and Gandhi’s struggles in India from foreign rulers and understood that violence only tends to stir up the hornets’ nest.  America is humanity’s great hope for peaceful civil protests and freedom from oppression.

As I approached home this morning, I passed a scene that is all too common in America’s southeast.  An invasive stand of smothering Kudzu vines had already covered a wide section of newly accessed trees near the bypass.  It is native to China and was innocently introduced in America to control erosion and serve as an ornamental shade plant.  However, it also absorbs all the sunlight for the plants under the canopy, suffocating them.  It now occupies an estimated 3,000,000 hectares and is destroying the environment at a rate of 50,000 baseball fields per year! Kudzu transposes living organisms into lifeless topiary support structures.  I was then forced to stop for a passing freight train whose cars were covered in graffiti.  I witnessed similar spray-painted graffiti being used to desecrate our national property and fellow citizens’ communities.  Both the Kudzu and lawless violence are a smothering scourge on our country.  And both are indications of more underlying problems for the future.

As an American citizen, I fully support needed social change and righting wrongs.  That’s the promise and job description of America.  But freedom is not the right to do as we please.  It’s the opportunity to do what is right!  I believe in the premise that love, not hate, is the most powerful force for personal change and for changing the world.  As an individual, I intend to do whatever I can to build a better world.  And I plan to exercise my lawful right to vote! 

BROKEN WINDOWS AND GRAFFITI II

27,000 Year Old Cave Print, Indonesia
Hazy New York Skyline, New York City, NY
Street Graffiti, West Bank, Israel

Crude sketches have been showing up on walls since the dawn of civilization. Neanderthal cave drawings have illustrated the trophy animals that were hunted for survival along with the artist’s hand print. American G.I.’s left the ubiquitous sketch of “Kilroy was here” throughout the arenas of World War II. My first trips to Mexico and Honduras immediately caught my attention as I passed the walls of buildings in whole communities covered in graffiti. It was generally accompanied with widespread littering along the road sides, especially on the outskirts of the towns. This isn’t a new problem, but it is a sort of “canary in a coal mine” indication that the people in these areas have succumbed to civil disobedience and apathy. Even poverty-stricken areas have the means to pick up their trash and not deface their own surroundings. I’ve witnessed graffiti on buildings from major cities like New York City to smaller communities like Bethlehem, Israel.

There are those who would claim some forms of graffiti in the cities are art, but it is plainly juvenile vandalism and blatant disrespect for civil order in their own neighborhoods. It always defaces the private property of someone else. In many cases in impoverished areas where someone is simply struggling to survive. In many cases, it represents criminal activity and worse. It’s a leading indicator that social controls and respect for law and order has disintegrated, making these public spaces vulnerable to even more serious civil disorder and law breaking. Disorder has been shown to breed fear in a neighborhood. That fear prompts those who have the means to leave, resulting in a further disintegration of facilities and order.

New York City embraced the academic “theory of broken windows” proposed by James Wilson and George Kelling in 1982. They observed that the physical disorder of broken windows, vacant buildings and trashed vacant lots lead to social disorder and fear among the inhabitants. I would add the ubiquitous presence of graffiti all over the community also contributes. However, these would all seem to be the symptoms of the more contentious root social problems of poverty, education, opportunity and a breakdown of the core family with a basic lack of respect for authority.

When New York City police commissioner William Bratton resigned in 1996 after pursuing a quality of life initiative to restore social order on the streets, felonies were down almost forty percent and the homicide rate had been halved. I’m concerned by all the social disorder these days in this country. We have systems in place to deal with our problems and violence has never been shown to be as effective as the peaceful civil disobedience practices of Gandhi, King and Christ. If we don’t learn from history, we’ll continue on our regressive path to once again be sketching animals on cave walls.