For the second time in three months, while setting in my usual parking place in front of my apartment, my car was vandalized - at a cost of $2,000 each time.
I can understand why someone on drugs might hold up a convenience store to get money for a hit. Or why a desperate person might try to rob a bank. I can even understand how someone might resort to violence in a fit of anger, but to intentionally damage someone else’s property as entertainment takes a particularly sick mind.
Personally, I would recommend drug treatment programs for druggies, or job training for people who think stealing is the only way to get money, but vandalism reeks of an illness in the culture that is far deeper. It is not related to poverty, greed, or substance abuse like so much crime is. There is nothing to be gained by the perpetrator except the knowledge that they have caused harm to someone else or someone else’s property.
A psychologist might look for a diagnosis of mental illness which is somehow the opposite of compassion. Learning to feel somebody else’s pain is a learned experience and somewhere along the line, this can get corrupted to the opposite where a person might get pleasure from someone else’s pain. Sociologists might look to society and see a person crying out for attention, and doing so in a very juvenile way of striking out at random. As a Christian, I see it as a sign that Satan is still in control of this planet and that my home is in heaven, and that I will be required to deal with evil as long as I am still on Earth.
However you view it, it means we’ve got a problem. I have to admit that my first reaction was to electrify my car with high voltage so if anybody touched it with a metal object, they would be knocked on their keester. This is doable and could probably be made to only react to a metal object on bare metal, not a casual brush by. A car alarm might be a more practically choice, but I hate those things going off accidentally and a blaring horn doesn’t quite have the satisfaction of knowing a vandal tazered himself while attacking my car. My insurance company may have better suggestions.
Obviously none of these are good solutions when the root problem is a sick society that encourages violence through media and video games and does little to teach respect for property. Moreover, how can we continually teach young people that they descended from apes and then expect them to behave like humans? Did I mention that this world is not my home?
