Plenty is at work here: a flood, not a house fire. Political hatred is at work. Father Shanley says that “hatred has no place at Providence College.” Indignation is prone to speak unadvisedly. Banish hatred? Good luck with that. Hatred is the principle and the aim of much of our current education. Whole departments are stocked with people who hate what they hate more than they love what they love, if they love at all. Read the mission statements. (This is as true of Providence College now as it is of the secular colleges down the road.) Remove hate and you cut the social sciences in half. You say you want to teach Plato so that some students will come to love Plato? You will be treated as either a liar or a fool.
The vandal has a college education. He has done graduate work in politics at a local college. Did he come by his hatred naturally? I don’t think so. It’s a fashion: hatred in the cause of the future. It liberates you from decency. You forget the humbling calls of piety and gratitude. You scorn the past. You become the sort of person who would wreck a graveyard, magna cum laude, as your teachers cheer, or turn aside and do not say a word. They help to ruin you, but you and not they will do the time. Many are the fingerprints on that spray can.
By Anthony Esolen