Ridiculous Item #0001
Barbed wire on freeway signs
Yes, I know why the Hell it’s there, but, really, why do people feel the need to tag anything? Certainly I’ve no problem with someone tagging on his own property, but that’s not really the problem here. Graffiti is a major problem in LA (and many other parts of the country) and the government seems to be entirely inept when it comes to addressing the problem. It’s pretty simple: make the punishments more severe.
Personally, I think bright pink jump suits and hours of graffiti removal would be fitting (I know at least one person who agrees with me). A week’s worth of hard labor scrubbing concrete and signs (while wearing a stylish hot pink singlesuit) would probably make the average graffiti-painting nitwit think twice before tagging something in the future. Hell, even if he doesn’t think before tagging again, at the very least he cleaned up some of the mess he helped to create.
The punishment should also scale with the number of offenses. If someone has been caught tagging five times, he should probably be spending damn near a month scrubbing everything in sight. Now, it would be fitting (and amusing) to make the punishment proportionate to the scope and scale of the crime; however, it would be both difficult and time- and resource-consuming to figure out who tagged what. Consequently, we, as a society, would simply have to settle for a standard set of punishments that would take into account things like gang affiliation, number of offenses, type of tagging, etc.
Graffiti is a problem that can, and should, be solved. There is no reason that a modern, civilized society should have to be surrounded by the feeble attempts at territorial marking of a bunch of ingrates who seem to be devoid of common decency and anything resembling common sense. As for anyone who makes the argument that they are just ‘expressing’ their ‘individuality’ or it’s ‘art’: I have news for you, it’s not art and they can go express their individuality somewhere else. It’s a crime and an intolerable affront to the civilized sectors of society.
Barbed wire on freeway signs: a band-aid on a festering sore. Covering up the problem isn’t going to fix it. If my dog relieves himself on the carpet, I don’t surround the carpet with a barrier of some kind (as much fun as it would be to morph my living room into some kind of cage-match-esque scene), I teach the dog to discontinue his bad behavior. The same should be done with the criminals who prompted some pea-brain to decide that surrounding everything under the sun with barbed wire would solve the problem. Well, it won’t.
As a society, we need to discontinue our habitual avoidance of the real problems in favor of impermanent cover-ups and transitory ’solutions.’ If we address the problem and not the aftermath or results of that problem, then we have some hope of effecting real change. Otherwise, we’re just drinking cough suppressant.
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