Our poor youth bomb the system with ink and paint

It is ironic that right about the time Winslow Police and the City start to "crack-down" on graffiti in town, that the "taggers" seemed to have finally arrived at a relative degree of artistic talent.

Down by the Ruby Wash Bridge, there are many abandoned outlines of graffiti lettering. The only thing left for them is to do color them all in.

There are many opinions about graffiti. To some, it is a vile disrespectful act against private property. To others, it is an artistic expression critical of the system it is marring. One could say that doing graffiti is like littering. When applied to a cheap cinder block wall or dirty freeway underpass, what difference does it make since a cheap wall, polluting road or abandoned building could be considered the biggest pieces of trash of all time? Familiarity breeds contempt.

This may be inferring quite a bit on some of the youth in Winslow, but if you consider the murals in town ‹ those walls have been respected and left alone. Compare the two canvasses. One choice being a boring and dirty old stucco wall where concrete covers where the windows used to be, while the other choice can be a positive scene of railroad history or of the surrounding natural landscape. Anyone would gravitate towards defacing what he or she does not like. In these cases, it would be the footprint of industrial or modern society vs. that of an artist. Can you guess where these taggers who are typically of the lower class, are going to place their ink or spray painted vote?

Inevitability, as the trains show us, graffiti is not something likely to go away anytime soon. So we have to figure out how to turn that negative into something positive.

In all likelihood, those out there signing their tag names are kids ‹ gangs perhaps, but not likely. In most small towns, it is popular for kids to try to imitate the "G" fantasy that is shallowly perpetuated by the gold tooth and pool party pomp and circumstance of musician/actors who are far removed from the "streets" in their golf course McMansions. But this problem stems from poor education, dysfunctional social and home environments, and is exponentially made worse by television. These are all issues not likely to go away anytime soon. So instead of punishing inevitable behavior, perhaps something could be offered to the youth by the way of individual expression and education.

Less and less, young Americans exposed to subjects like art, while it is not for everybody, the same could be said for math. Every student is different and should not be corralled into a mass education policy designed to generate more engineers and physicists.

We give kids more credit, beginning in kindergarten, by trying to expose them to completely ignored subjects like agriculture and philosophy. What is the worst that could happen? The youth develop a marginal understanding of nutrition and environment, and then actually desire to form opinions on other issues important to them.

Those kids out there spraying all over the underpasses and alleyways, are trying to express an opinion, but maybe nobody has taught them how, so they act in this manner that upsets those who cannot relate.

How is the City of Winslow going to relate to a group of people with typically less education, less status and almost no ability to gain property of their own? Generations of renters too poor to own their own property are not going to have any respect for other properties when the system does not represent them.

We should work harder to make more tools available that help youth realize their potential, not lock-up the spray tools in a petty attempt to fix a symptom, not a problem, that no amount of pressure washing or painting over will be able to hide.

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