Previous
Random acts
As our columnist Harry Stemp argues on page 15, there are plenty of good-spirited young people in Uxbridge to counteract the bad apples who undertook the vandalism at the arena on Sept. 21. Our Tiger Talk columnists mention several hundred of them on page 10, and we profile two in particular on page 6, young men who have dedicated a fair portion of their lives thus far to perfecting their skills in a chosen area about which they’re passionate.
As another columnist, Lisha Van Nieuwenhove, ponders opposite, it’s difficult to understand why one human being deliberately chooses to contribute positively to the lives of his fellow human beings, while another who grew up in substantially the same environment, in this case the small town of Uxbridge, chooses to be destructive, to deliberately tear down what others have patiently built, to create ugliness and fear instead of beauty and trust.
If indeed some of the vandals are caught on the surveillance cameras, it will be interesting to see how they, and their parents, are dealt with by the justice system. In cases like this where physical and moral damage is done to the criminal’s community, prison should be the last resort. Instead, ways should be found to force the criminal to answer to us. He (and his parents, perhaps) should be obliged to repair the physical damage, yes, to painstakingly rebuild what he destroyed in a few seconds of mindless rage.
But the sentence should go beyond that. Some way should be found to make the criminal sit down among those he hurt with his actions and answer our questions, to make us understand why he did these things. We like to think we live in a safe, healthy, friendly community, but these random acts of violence keep happening, and it’s only a matter of time before the violence is committed on people as well as property. The threatening of the tennis players on Sept. 21 is an ominous sign of that.
So sit down among us, vandal, and tell us why you’ve made these choices. What is it about our town, our high school, our community life, that makes you so angry? What, in the moment when you decide to destroy something, would it take for you to go the other way, choose the other path?
What would be chilling is if, in the end, there is no answer, that these random acts are just that, totally random, a knee-jerk response absolutely in keeping with these young people’s cultural upbringing. If a young man spends the vast majority of his leisure time playing violent video games, why should we expect kindness or charity to be his go-to response when he emerges into the real world? In his youth, his aggression is directed at inanimate objects, at property, rather than other living creatures, but it’s only a matter of time...
Somewhere, someone must have done a doctoral study comparing the life paths of those who are relentlessly exposed to violence as a leisure activity, to those who choose to study music or become a Roxy Kid instead. We’d like to see it, just to get a glimpse below the surface of our not-so-safe community.
July 14, 2011
