SorryWatch usually advocates the media* principle of putting apologies in the same place as the thing you’re apologizing for. For example, if you broadcast an absolute lie on “Fox & Friends,” the clarification and apology should also be on “Fox & Friends,” not in some talking head’s Twitter account. (*Clearly, when we say “media” we mean “some media.”)
But. If you feel bad about spray-painting graffiti, should you go back and spray-paint an apology? (If you regret shooting up the bar, should you go back and outline the words “THAT WAS UNFORTUNATE” in bullet holes behind the pool table?)
This changes everything.
And by the way: When you go into your newly fixed-up church offices in the morning and discover that vandals have spray-painted all the walls and discharged a fire extinguisher – why assume it was “kids”? Why couldn’t it have been a gang from the assisted living place, maddened by ennui? Why not a posse of new parents, influenced by the evil behavior of their toddlers? Why not a fed-up bunch of those people of indeterminate age, sick and tired of being treated as invisible? Why not a multi-generational family group of Satanists?
No, people say, “kids.” For whatever reasons.
People tried not to say “kids” when talking about the spray paint-wielding individuals who broke into the newly-renovated building at the Woodside Community Church in Greenwood, Indiana, and then expressed themselves with tags, “vulgar pictures,” stars both 5- and 6-pointed, “curse words,” arrows, the legend “420,” shocking abbreviations like “WTF,” and – in what is surmised to be their last action – “Sorry, Just Realized This wuz A Church!”
The church’s youth leader, Julie Petty, said “We prayed for the kids that did this – or whoever did this.” Pastor Mark Petty spoke of forgiveness and said “We love ’em. As a church, we’d love to have ’em come back and do the right thing. We would take ’em into our youth group.”
Which might be a sure way of stopping them from coming back and doing the right thing.
Not a rave club. Just assume every building is a church, okay?
How did the invaders not realize they were in a church? Well, it doesn’t look like a classic Christian church – no steeple, no stained glass, no pews. It’s not actually the church, it’s a building that the church had just finished fixing up to be a community center and offices – the chapel is next door, and even that’s not obviously churchy.
Also, until recently, the former barn was something else, a “hot spot for teens and violence.”
The pastor would like everyone to know that “This is not a rave club. This is a church now.” The sign out front is kind of a tip-off. If you’re the kind of person that reads signs.
Was that a good apology? No. It just made one more wall that has to be repainted. It’s both a tiny bit better than no apology, and also worse, because TOTALLY MISSING THE POINT. It’s probably the reason the story made local TV news. Causing neighbors to come forward and say they saw “three teens” near the church on the day of the vandalism. Kids.
Whatever the age of the Greenwood miscreants, they are unlikely to reveal themselves, for fear of the youth group. (In their favor, the pastor notes the intruders didn’t steal the computer or the new TV.
SorryWatch recalls a graffiti apology last year in Speke, Liverpool. Vandals spray-painted anti-Pakistani and anti-Muslim graffiti on the outside of a house being prepared for new occupants, and also broke some of the windows. Media covered the story, noting that those new occupants were not from Pakistan. They were from Sri Lanka.
Who?
One member of the family said, “We are not even Muslims, we are Hindu, and we hate the terrorists also. I am very upset and scared now. I have a wife and three young children, but we are still going to move in.”
The vandals sneaked back to the house, where smashed windows had been boarded up and the graffiti had been whitewashed over. Dismayed by their earlier mistake, they spray-painted “SORRY” on the house.
No. No no no, God no.
That’s a whole new misdemeanor count. If you’re really burning to apologize, really afraid of the law, why not paint your apology on a BOARD and leave it at the scene? So they don’t have to drag out the whitewash AGAIN? And do we have to say this whole thing would not have been okay if they were Muslims from Pakistan? That it would still be a hate crime?
Oh okay then?
IDIOTS.
Also, if the whole neighborhood is angry about your loud party last night, the thing to do is not to parade around under their windows with a megaphone yelling “SORRY ABOUT THAT! WE GOT CARRIED AWAY! WE REGRET THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS, DUDES! MOVING FORWARD, WE’LL INVITE YOU NEXT TIME!”
(Thanks to Candy C., who knows the difference between an abbreviation and an acronym.)
I agree: we can stop blaming kids.
We can instead encourage journalists and news anchors to popularize the use of the phrase “completely puerile nincompoops.” Because SERIOUSLY? Going back to spray paint, “SORRY?” What…?
One suspects that the default assumption that “kids” are behind such vandalism is the hope – probably futile – that those over the age of majority are more likely to be able to restrain their baser impulses. Then again, we live in a country where children who survive mass shootings are considered legitimate targets of smear campaigns, so there’s that.