It's a beautiful, sunny day as I finish my shift. The first thing I see as I step outside is a man who has peeled off his shirt and is now standing on a bench in front of the Black Lives Matter sign, yelling. It's the same old spiel: All Lives Matter, I'm Nor Racist It's The Sign That's Racist, that sort of thing. Two of my fellow employees are trying to reason with him but is growing increasingly irate. I stand there for a minute or two, then keep on walking. I can hear him scream from two blocks away.
The following night, three people in black hoodies stop and look up at the sign. The tallest of them holds an umbrella to cover his face from the camera as he clambers onto the railing to write the word NATIVE in green spray paint over the word BLACK. As they continue on through the breezeway, he scrawls NATIVE LIVES MATTER and what looks like the cross-hairs of a rifle scope on the side of the beleaguered Caro sculpture.
The Native Lives Matter movement is obviously not as widely talked about as Black Lives Matter, and it must be frustrating to watch someone else's cause get national attention while yours gets ignored. The vandals in the hoodies look really young and are probably just out making mischief without thinking about it too much. But they've just done the same thing to the Black community which was done to theirs (assuming they're actually native): negated it. Spray-painted words are obviously not comparable to genocide, but they still send a message, and the message is, our needs are more important than yours. Our pain is greater than your pain. I realize this is probably similar to what the guy with no shirt thinks is what the BLM sign is saying to him, and I wish there was a way of trying to make him understand things better, but the moment you take off your shirt and start screaming at strangers, you're broadcasting that you're not really interested in civilized discourse.
The graffiti on the sign washes off easily, but the Caro will have to be attended to by our new conservationist, who doesn't seem to be in any great hurry to touch it. As I stand there looking at it, a guy staggers up to me with a medical bracelet on his wrist. He points to his stomach and says he needs to get abdominal surgery. I give him a few bucks and he asks me what I'm looking at. I point at the graffiti and he says, "Man, that's fucked up." And while it is, indeed, fucked up -and keep in mind, this may be my privilege talking- it's also getting harder and harder for me to care about any of this shit.
