Every one of the ornate light fixtures along the old bridge had been smashed out. Not one globe had been spared.

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The Vandals Arrive

While riding in the car as a child along the old river bridge, my mom pointed out to me that the vandalized light fixtures and decorations had been built during a different time, and that the gaslights had originally been installed for the convenience of the people who walked across the river in the old days, when nobody seriously imagined the idea of anyone intentionally destroying them.

She remembered those days, and she remembered when the vandalism started. 

  
Together, my mother and I noted that something must have changed in society's mind since the bridge had been built.

I was way too young then to understand what it might have been that had bitten and infected society, and I just watched the ruined features go by outside the window.

Since then, however, I've had some time to think about it, and it seems now like the vandalism started when an obviously immoral government system created distrust and resentment in the herd. Like adolescents rebelling against stern abusive parents, society was just gonna break some shit instead of listening to the lying grown-ups any longer.

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Moral Bankruptcy

The exact year that the government officially declared moral bankruptcy I don't know-- it was before I got here. When I was three years old, President Kennedy was killed. As a little child, I was probably upset because there was a funeral on TV instead of whatever Captain Kangaroo stuff I was trying to watch, but everybody else was crying for bigger reasons. After the mourning, they wept on. 

    They no longer trusted their own government.

 
Everybody in their right mind knew that they were being betrayed by their masters after that. They had enjoyed their servitude as children, when nobody dared complain, but suddenly they dared. They got tired of being polite. They were being lied to, and they knew it. Many of them knew that they were about to be drafted into Armed Services, and they didn't like that either.

With such thick distrust hanging in the clouds over a traumatized America, nobody should have been completely surprised when the streetlights started getting smashed out, and spray-paint started to appear on ornamental fixtures in the many unhappy towns around the troubled landscape.

               

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Are You COOL?  

It didn't take long for the subculture and TV programming to persuade me to try to be a cool kid, and it began by suggesting to me that I had to make a choice. I could be boring and unpopular, or I could be 'cool'. 

 
It was made clear through the media that the cool kids knew how to lie and steal, knew how to light a cherry bomb and knew how to smoke at school. They cheated on tests and shirked authority, they had tried alcohol and maybe other things, and the grown-ups knew them as "bad kids". 

As a nerdy naturalist snake-hunting science-based artist kid, I crawled out of the forest in my adolescence without a clue, and imagined fitting in to this fractured society. When I looked at my choices, 'Bad' kid was obviously the way to go, I thought. 

 
I'd never even seen a cherry bomb though, so I knew I was way behind in my overall delinquency. Somehow then, I reasoned that it would be good to learn how to be bad.

 How to Be Bad 

 
One of my first memories of my journey into this labyrinth of cultural programming was, as a boy, when I was flipping through a copy of 'The Last Whole Earth Catalog'. I remember being amazed-- there were real cuss words, typed out and printed in this book. I couldn't believe my eyes. 

"Wait 'til my friends see THIS!!" I had found verification of a forbidden world-- and possible proof that being bad may not be too bad. 

 
Somewhere in my head a frightening thought occurred: "I don't know how to cuss."

Next, I needed to get rid of my coat and get myself a jacket. Cool kids wear jackets.

I checked my pockets: a harmonica, a marble, a bird call, a small yo-yo, and two Bazooka Joe gum wrappers. This would never do.

I had a list of things in my head that I would need to be bad, according to my research:

1. Slingshot (I already had one of those, so it made the list-- could be handy in a bad way) 

2. Make some nunchucks 

3. Get a switchblade 

4. Start smoking 

5. Get A Zippo lighter 

6. Steal something 

7. Be in a real fight

I was ready to start practicing to become a juvenile delinquent while I worked on the list. Since everybody wanted to be cool, it was easy to find an accomplice in the neighborhood-- somebody to aid and abet-- and it was my neighbor, another juvenile like me-- we'll call him 'Bob'.

Bob and I headed up to the nearby shopping center to begin our lives as delinquents. 

  
We slunk into the Safeway store first, looking around as if we shopped. In a back isle, Bob spotted something on a shelf, and pocketed it before I could see what it was. He was learning fast!

Back out in the sidewalk, we ran down to the end of the building and around into the alleyway. (cool kids hang out in alleyways) Bob dug into his coat pocket, and pulled out the item.

It was a roll of price-labeling stickers. We laughed out there in our alley-- we were the worst juvenile delinquents ever. But there was room for improvement, and now I had an idea. A bad idea, as in-- 'bad kids'. I took the roll of stickers again.

 
Like hyenas, we circled back around the building, and stopped at the soft drink machine in front. We were about to step things up-- some delinquency was about to happen, and we were already feeling cooler.

I pointed at the change-dispenser pocket on the vending machine. Bob nodded. I peeled off a couple of the price tag stickers from our new roll and, looking around quickly, I reached up inside the change-dispensing chute and stuck the stickers over the change exit hole, just out of view.

"Now... we wait!" I said in my best crime voice. 

 We already had a PLAN A., and a PLAN B. 

 
Plan A. was to get enough returnable soda bottles together to buy some cigarettes. The organization needed cash to operate, and the bottles were our best source of income, for now. (We knew that smoking was going to take a little practice, and we were ready to get started.)

  
Plan B. was, if we couldn't get enough cash together to buy cigarettes, then we would just STEAL some cigarettes. Either plan would qualify us as bad, we decided. Ultimately, bad kids needed smokes, and it didn't matter so much how they got them. 

Inside the shopping plaza was a lobby with an elevator lift to the second floor offices. We had figured out how to open the doors while the thing was in transit between floors. It would stop and we would sit there snickering, defiant, and bad. It had become a requirement-- our duty to badness-- to jam the car between floors during our patrols. We did our duty.

There was an interior office hallway upstairs on the other side of the building where another cold soda vending machine was just sitting. 

 
Enter bad kids: I plugged the change dispenser chute like the other machine, and while I stuck it to the system with a stolen price-label sticker, Bob lifted a whole CASE of empty returnable bottles-- crate included-- and started walking. Bob was so creative. 

We marched back around the building, and Bob went into the Safeway to cash in the bottles while I checked the front vending machine's change chute. Sure enough, when I reached inside with two fingers and pulled the price sticker off, a big fat nickel clinked into the waiting pocket. Somebody's change-- it would now be used to help finance our criminal enterprise. 

 
Criminal masterminds. Cool kids. Nobody could question our cool status now-- not after that spree. 

Not A Bad Ending

 
We wandered off, I can't remember if we ever got our cigarettes that particular day. It didn't matter-- a few weeks later we all questioned the value of being 'bad' kids when, (and by some miracle I wasn't around that day) Bob and some of the other kids from the neighborhood all got caught shoplifting some toys at the variety store. 

 
With real cops and concerned parents all now involved, it ended our juvenile delinquency then and there. Cool was no longer cool. We all quit being so bad, eventually grew up I suppose, and the kids who were shown how to be bad by their very culture ended up being good people. I never made the pair of nunchucks, and never got in a real fight, and never got around to a few other things on the list that never made sense anyway, and I got myself a warm, nerdy coat.

  
                           

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I still don't know with certainty what changed society-- when things broke and the streetlights went out with a crash into the dark-- when we couldn't have nice things anymore. If society was just going through a teenage rebellious phase, then I wonder how old it is now.
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