[Caution: trigger warning]
This morning I saw the most disturbing graffiti. Three of us stepped in to the boys’ bathroom of the Housing Community Center on campus and were shocked. We had been told not to clean until the words were documented. The walls read, “Kill Rapists” and “Dead men can’t rape.” I didn’t know what I was expecting, a mess, another common tag, who knows? What I saw scared me.
Fighting words were spray painted in a common living space. I thought of images I had seen of genocides and wars around the world. These were words of war, of death. There has been an Anti-Rapist contingency on campus. I suppose if there is going to be a hate group, one that is against rape is better than others. These people however, have identified or possibly slandered a known Evergreen student as a rapist/rapist-apologizer.
Angry and unwarranted fliers have been posted around campus; protests and meetings have been held in a violent manor. Fighting words do not bring peace or justice. These actions rouse anger and people with pitchforks and torches. Give it time and a lynch mob is going for this man whose guilt or innocence has yet to be proven.
“Attack and counter attack,” James Nachtwe, a war photographer, said in a TED talk lecture, “only perpetuates the cycle of violence.” If these types of action continue someone is going to get hurt or possibly killed and no one will have justice. Injustice of any kind is terrible. People are angry and are ready for a fight. Targeting individuals or a group of individuals violently is how situations like that of the mass communist killings of 1965 in Indonesia or the Salem witch hunt begin. Personal attacks, warranted or not, are unacceptable, violence is never the answer.
Fighting words are not the answer. Nothing is going to be solved by fighting. I can see the circumstances of a war beginning at Evergreen. Fighting words inflame anger. Personal attacks create fear. Fear and anger are all that is needed to start a war or genocide. Is Evergreen the place for rape? No, of course it isn’t. There is no place for rape, ever. However there is also no place for personal, vicious attacks. We all know the system isn’t perfect and often has many flaws. But the way things have been done recently hampers the cause; it does not aide it.