I’ll admit that in middle school and even high school, I “vandalized” a poster or two by drawing silly little hearts or my name on them, perfectly harmless “defacement of property.” However, since arriving at college, aware of the divide in maturity between high school and college such urges haven’t manifested.
I cite this abandoned habit for I wish to address the amount of shameful, juvenile vandalism that I have seen this semester. For example, two of the candidates running for the position of LSPB club chairs devised these clever posters that featured the lyrics of Biggie Small’s track, “Juicy.” The verse that they had selected read “and if you don’t know, now you know.” For those of you unfamiliar with this song, the next lyric is the ‘N’-word, which – for obvious reasons – the candidates did not include on their poster. However, one less-than-intelligent individual seized an opportunity for immaturity and scribbled the missing ‘N’-word on two of the posters in green marker. This action was extremely insensitive and harmful to the atmosphere of the Le Moyne College campus. To walk down the hallway only to be met by that word plastered on the wall was unnerving; I was shocked to see that a Le Moyne student would stoop that low.
Unfortunately, I came across yet another vandalized poster. Recently, I was walking through Reilly Hall and happened to see a poster with a young, male, Caucasian student dressed in dress shirt and Khaki pants, the poster promoted a graduate school program or something else educational, I honestly cannot recall, for I was too distracted by what someone had written across the young man’s forehead, “I’m Gay,” accompanied by an equals sign and a crudely illustrated penis.
Really! Why would someone draw that? How bored must one be to stop and deface a perfectly innocent advertisement in such a distasteful manner?
It’s the year 2012; Le Moyne is home to successful clubs such as C. A. R.E. (Creating Awareness and Reaching for Equality) that stand up to ignorance regarding orientation such as the anti-gay sentiment that had been added to this poster. C’mon, we’re better than this! We are too old to be vandalizing posters. Fortunately, it seems as if there are only a few perpetrators.
However, these individuals continue to leave a mark with their hateful graffiti. Vandalism of any kind – whether it be silly little hearts, giving someone gaps in their smile or seriously offensive slurs – is unacceptable and unnecessary. Likewise, the anonymity of these actions is wimpy and lame of that person, for if one cannot admit to writing something that everyone sees, then why do it in the first place? To those of you vandals who may be reading this, we’re college students, don’t you have something better to do than this nonsense?
