Modest Proposal : ‘Make Taggers Clean Up’

They come in the night, armed with spray cans. During these night hours when all is dark, they express themselves, leave their personalized message for all to see the following day when the sun shines. I see it as teen-age terrorism.

Every day as I drive the 405 Freeway from Orange County to Long Beach, I avert my eyes because looking at the graffiti fills me with such rage and a sense of helplessness. It seems that we are fighting a losing battle, for as soon as the graffiti is cleaned up, it reappears.

What can be done? For starters, why is it that the parents of these taggers don’t seem to know what their children are doing? If you think about tagging on the 405, the likelihood is that it takes place between midnight and 5 a.m. when it is least traveled. Why don’t parents of 10- to 17-year-olds know where their kids are?

I wrote a letter to the California Department of Transportation last year with the following suggestion: Plant something like bougainvillea on the walls surrounding the freeways. It is drought-tolerant, grows quickly, would cover the walls and make it impossible to spray paint; and it has thorns, a natural deterrent. They wrote back that it would be cost prohibitive, but they were considering many options. It’s now been over a year and I haven’t seen any progress. At $25,000 a month for current cleanup, my idea sounds like a bargain.

I believe that I am not the only person who is outraged by this vandalism and that many Southern Californians would be willing to work with their cities to help solve this problem. Parents need to start taking responsibility for the actions of their children. I know of a student in a private Catholic high school with exceedingly high academic standards who is a tagger. His peers know about it, but I’ll bet his parents don’t. And finally, when these taggers are caught, let’s make sure that as part of the punishment, taggers and their parents clean up the mess they made, at their expense, rather then ours. Perhaps then parents might start to care where their children are and what they are doing.