A longtime resident of Uxbridge, Ted Barris has written professionally for 40 years - for radio, television, magazines and newspapers. The "Barris Beat" column began in the 1950s when his father Alex wrote for the Globe and Mail. Ted continues the tradition of offering a positive view of his community. He has written 16 non-fiction books of Canadian history and teaches journalism at Centennial College in Toronto.
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Good old-fashoned notice
The impressions are nearly permanent.
They leave an indelible imprint along our park paths, down our residential streets and even in our downtown. There's a toppled signpost here, a broken fence there, some torn up shrubbery or a line of graffiti scrawled across a wall. They are the blight of every community where vandals appear to be winning. But to call those who perpetrate this behaviour “vandals” is an insult to the original word.
“Vandals,” the dictionary explains, “were the east Germanic tribes that sacked ancient Rome in the fifth century.”
My guess is that the east Germanic tribes of ancient Europe had a legitimate bone to pick with the legions of soldiers and despotic emperors of ancient Rome. Tyranny has a habit of provoking an equally nasty response. The folks who break, spoil or deface in our community today, however, I don't think rate as highly as their ancient namesakes. They're not pursuing any noble cause. They're just in it for the kicks. They just want to be noticed. Or, to borrow from a marketing specialist I once read:
“Unless you have a brand, you're a nobody.”
I was particularly bothered by the picture of the cracked and broken windows in the York-Durham Heritage Railway rolling stock, published in the newspapers a week or so ago. Vandalism of any sort seems objectionable enough. Vandalism perpetrated against volunteers - those among us who give of their spare time without recognition or recompense - seemed particularly loathsome. I'm sure such damage sustained in the railway yard adjacent downtown must demoralize the YDHR folks no end. It's a wonder they carry on under such circumstances. On the other hand, given the times, repairing the damage of vandalism may well be something such organizations build into their budgets.
I'm reminded of the New York City initiative born in the 1980s when the city's public areas and transit seemed perpetually covered in graffiti. In response to the spray paint, felt-tipped markings and even the scratch patterns inflicted by so-called graffiti taggers, the city fought back. Then Mayor Rudy Guiliani saw the graffiti as a symptom of urban decay. His “broken window” theory held that an unfixed broken window or uneradicated patch of graffiti gave a city block the appearance of decay and encouraged the lawless to persist unchecked.
To fight back, Guiliani's administration created an anti-vandalism squad of police and civic workers. Police made arrests when citizens called in reports of graffiti taggers at work, while cleaning and painting trucks were dispatched to wash and spray away the graffiti even as the vandals' paint was drying. Since 1997, when the anti-graffiti campaign was instituted, New Yorkers have witnessed 16 million square feet of graffiti removed on over 6,000 sites. It cost millions, but the graffiti went away.
I'm not sure the New York City model of fighting fire with fire applies in a community such as Uxbridge. But the lesson is there. If enough citizens view knocking down markers in the local cemetery, smashing bottles in public parks or punching holes in heritage railway cars as a slight against them personally, then the will to affect change can't be far behind.
But I guess we have to ask: Where does this urge to get such notice come from? I don't think we need look any further than our own electronic pastimes. When a society spends as much time seeking exposure on the Internet as this one does, how can anyone deny that people today feel they need to be, heck, they ought to be seen? According to the latest statistics, for example, Facebook, the largest social networking website on the World Wide Web, boasts more than 63 million subscribers. That's twice the number of people in Canada sharing their views, revealing their relationships and publishing their most candid photography every hour of every day. And I understand that the number of active Facebook users is doubling every six months. Add to that the equally phenomenal and artificial explosion of YouTube, MySpace and Twitter - other social networks - and even the most naive among us can recognize the trend.
Ours is a world of individuals desperately seeking notice.
If that seems an oversimplification of the problem of vandalism, fighting graffiti or giving people the self-esteem they deserve without having to resort to artificial exposure, so be it. Sometimes the worst social ills call for simple social responses - giving people credit when it's due, face-to-face acknowledgement when they deserve it and a verbal pat on the back instead of an antiseptic e-mail.
