Graffiti is Good

Graffiti is good. I mean, how else are we going to know what people are thinking - especially the youth? They need to write on walls to get our attention, and that's OK. Look, let's say that you and a crew of eight people worked really hard over the last four weeks building a wall along a highway, carefully placing the stones to make a pattern, or tiling a 5 meter high, 200 meter long wall with 2 cm x 2 cm tiles, or whatever. Then, in the middle of the night, some drunken university student comes with a 10 shekel spray can and writes in huge black letters "Get The US oUt oF Irak!" (randomly inserting upper-case letters and misspelling "Iraq"). What's the problem with that? Self expression is good. Some people write blogs, others paint pictures or take photos, while others express themselves by verbally abusing passers-by or by vandalising property. Nothing wrong with that, is there?

Aside from the "Fred waz ere '82" type of graffiti, which is plain boring and basically useless, there are obviously some very clever and witty graffiti vandals out there. Sometimes one wonders if the graffiti vandal just has a wrong point of view or if he is trying to be sarcastic. Example: On a wall in Ramat Beit Shemesh "Torah is the way of truth and good!" (nobody told the vandal that defacing someone else's property is not an example of Torah values); or (scratched into a tree) "I Love Nature". There are also types of graffiti that don't mean anything, give a message or put forward a viewpoint - they are just meant to be destructive and messy, possibly with some meaning for the vandal alone. A private joke in public. Ha Ha. The joke's on us.

Normally, if a person isn't good at something, the last thing they want to do is publicise it. For instance, if I have no artistic talent, then why would I want to sign my name to a painting and exhibit it in the public domain? It would simply be embarrassing. So if I can't spell, why would I want to take a spray can and write stuff on walls where everyone can see it? This seems to be the case with the majority of graffiti vandals - they can't spell. For example, there is a railway bridge which crosses over a main road in Melbourne (Inkerman Road, just before Chapel Street). On the side of the bridge in very large letters are the words, "This brige is self supporting" - which would be funny, except for the fact that the perpetrator of this graffiti can't spell "bridge". To cover up their obvious illiteracy, graffiti vandals will either spell each word incorrectly on purpose so that it looks like they really do know how to spell, but just don't want to (e.g.: Fred waz ere '82), or they will run all the letters together so that you can't read the word.

I think that next time, before you get the urge to ruin someone's fence by writing, "I hate vandals" in red spray paint, it might pay to use a dictionary for those hard words...