This morning I’m thinking about crime and punishment. Sin and redemption, maybe.

Our school got vandalized this past weekend. The new mural, which my wife’s art students have been working on for months, was severely damaged: they spraypainted racist and sexist words, large phalluses, and extremely stupid pro-drug comments all over it. We don’t know who did it, but whoever it was clearly targeted the mural specifically, as nothing else was damaged (A couple of small tags in the parking lot are the only other marks left behind).

I have no idea why someone would do that. You’re pissed off? Sure, that’s fine; do something about it, confront people, post on the internet that you’re mad, write a letter, hell, stand outside with a sign and say “YOU SUCK!” There are a thousand ways to express your anger, most of them very satisfying. What the hell do you get from something like this? Is it funny to be cruel to innocent people? My presumption is that the anger of those who did it was directed either at the school or at humanity and the world in general; so why go after the artwork being created by people you don’t hate? And if you do hate them, why go after that?

If we do catch who did it — and it was reported to the police as a hate crime, as indeed it was — then their punishment probably won’t be enough, because it probably won’t fix the problem: someone who thinks this is the way to go about expressing your anger is only going to continue targeting the wrong victims in the wrong ways. I don’t know how you fix that.

I know how you fix the mural, though. I know because the students and staff at the school did that yesterday, as soon as the vandalism was discovered. The people who had been leading the mural project were seniors, so they weren’t at the school as they graduated this weekend; two of them did come by, intending to work on the mural, which was unfinished; when they saw what had been done to it, it crushed them. It was the rest of the school, out of affection for those young artists — and for my wife, who was helping out with the mural mainly in an advisory role, though she did also put several difficult hours of work into it — who took it upon themselves to try to clean off the spraypaint, and then to re-paint the original design so as to cover up what could not be removed.

It’s not fixed. It’s not finished; there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. The alumni who were leading it are not sure yet if they want to try to finish the piece, because clearly, it is vulnerable and it is a target, and there’s very little stopping the vandals from coming back and doing it all again. If our artists decided to take the risk, and put whatever spirit they have left into finishing this mural, only to have it defaced a second time? It would be devastating.

That would be a hate crime. That would be vandalism, in the sense of meaningless destruction. And there wouldn’t be enough punishment for people who would do that.