It's Just Nasty...

I don't like graffiti. Actually that's a little soft. I hate graffiti.

I've always hated it. I don't understand it. I don't understand the drive to do it. It just makes things look ugly and gross. 

And I do differentiate between a lovely mural, and street art and graffiti. Which I know a lot of people don't. For a lot of people if it's painted on a wall it's graffiti. 

For me if it's just the ugly spray paint tag of initials, or the (and this one just pisses me off) carved in Joe Was Here type shit on railings, I hate it. It's ugly. It ruins things. 

When my friend Corrie came to visit about 10 years ago (crazy it was that long!) she remarked about how clean Portland was. I hadn't really noticed, but she was right. Compared to the East Coast especially and where I grew up in the Southwest there was a real lack of graffiti. We just didn't have much. When there was some it was cleaned up pretty quickly. Street art? Sure. But just graffiti? Not so much.

That's all changed now. We have a lot more graffiti. We have a lot more trash on the streets. Part of it is due to an increase in our houseless population. That's the trash. We don't have the collection sites we need for that many people outside. Part of it, the part with the graffiti, is we don't have the budgets for cleanups anymore. And the way a lot of the tagging type graffiti goes is once someone puts their mark someplace then someone else needs to add theirs, and so on and so on. 

I really hate it. I wish it were all lovely murals, or even really well done lettering. But it's not. It's just messy initials or nicknames or symbols for whatever is being protested for or against at the moment. And often it covers up the lovely things that were there before. The things that people worked to craft.

And I understand that people do some of it to get a message out there. It gets shown on the news. It's hard to ignore when you look at a building. But it's still ugly. 

And all of that being said, it's not something that should be a felony. And it's certainly not violence. It's something that should be able to be punished with a bucket and some cleaning solution. You made the mess, you clean it up. Which, of course, a lot of it is being sprayed on certain buildings with just that intent in mind. Pointing out who made the mess and who needs to clean it up. 

I feel the same way about shit posting on social media, by the way. It's the graffiti of social spaces. It makes things ugly. It hides away the actual valid posts that people could be making. Mars the murals so to speak.

I think if you are making these "ironic" posts it generally means you actually feel that way. At least part of you does because you are propagating it. You are spreading it. Friends of mine who have made them know I will call them out. I will question their motives. I will point out, over and over, if necessary, that spreading ignorance for the joke of it just means validating someone else who actually believes those things. 

There are no ironic racist posts. You see it over and over again. People who made their name being edgelords on Twitter, or making "Ironic" jokes on YouTube or Facebook who then are suddenly discovered to be ACTUAL racists! How shocking! It's not. To make a shit post joke you have to at least see the humor in it a little. And generally more than a little. You are just aware enough that it's not acceptable behavior to try and make the spin that you are pointing out some deeper truth. 

You aren't. 

You're showing your ass. 

The people laughing with you are showing theirs.

I'm not shocked when I find out you were actually a terrible person. 

I already knew. 

I hate shit posting. 
I hate graffiti.
I hate people who aren't brave enough to own their own shit and try to hide behind "it was a joke" or "I was just being ironic."

I'm not joking. 

I hate it.