Our gate-crasher's back. 

You may recall how my neighbor Rob's garden, which he's apparently abandoned for a back yard of his own in Jamaica Plain, was broken into in July.   I've always admired Rob's garden, with its glorious pink magnolia, and coveted his weathered wooden fence with its mantle of grape vines.  His unassuming gate was lovely as well.  Once upon a time.

I was a little dismayed when the break-ins began and breaking things seemed to be the point of them.  People do occasionally borrow a garden for a midnight rendezvous — and while they might trample a few petunias in the process or leave a little something behind, the damage is usually minimal, and certainly not the main purpose.

But late-night lovers share the park with the homeless and dispossessed, and their ghosts, not to mention drunks, drug dealers, petty thieves and small-time hustlers.  And among this rogue's gallery, there are understandably some anti-social elements.  For them the question is, why hop a fence when you can kick in a gate instead? 

Ever asked yourself who breaks all those windows in abandoned buildings?  It only takes one.  Again — it's the "broken windows theory": “if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken." Wilson and Kelling seem to think it's a simple matter of cost-benefit analysis: "one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.”

I understand it costs nothing, but my question is: what's the benefit?  I don't even see the point, much less the benefit.  Myself, I can't say that it's a big temptation when I pass a window to throw a brick through it.  It's just not my idea of a good time.  But obviously there are a lot of folks out there who get off on smashing things up.  Vandalism — willful and malicious destruction of public or private property — is pretty much ubiquitous in society, even in affluent areas.

There are, of course, a lot of theories out there.  The aesthetic theory of Allen and Greenberger posits that "more complex patterns of destruction are more enjoyable.  In an experiment where participats saw different types of glass breaking, they indicated they would be most interested in actually breaking the type whose disintegration was judged by others to be more complex."

Then there's Fisher and Baron's equity theory of vandalism, that proposes that those who perceive they've gotten the shaft from society will "seek redress".  Those who are high on internal control will "seek retribution through socially accepted means," while those who "experience moderate-to-low levels of perceived control will seek compensation through vandalism."

I don't know whether our gate-crasher is an aesthete or a would-be revolutionary.  But there's definitely something going on.  After the first incident, unable to get in touch with Rob, I repaired the gate as best I could, with a hammer and some nails, only to find it kicked in again the next day, and the wooden slats I had nailed back on broken and flung aside.  Which I perceived as a "take that!"

I thought, OK, it's on.

So I went the whole hog the second time around, and  not only repaired the slats but added some wire mesh and some nails popping up along the top to make it harder to hop over.  Mind you, I was under no illusions that a few good kicks couldn't undo all my hard work.  But I was more interested in making a statement myself.  After all, the way it's supposed to work, according to Wilson and Kelling is: if you replace the first broken window promptly, you nip the thing in the bud, right?

Yeah, right.

Of course, the next day, the thing was torn apart and the bits strewn gleefully along the path. 

I've dealt with this before — in chat rooms, say, or comment threads, where some poor, lonely soul spoiling for a fight says something outrageous and seizes on any response, and follows up with jeering insults.  For me there's no point in arguing when the point is arguing.  Whether the violence is verbal or takes the form of vandalism, as in my neighbor's garden, this was some poor dispossessed soul screaming into The Void.  And here some fool had answered.  Which is a good day in The Void.

Sometimes all you can do when you're dealing with this sort is back away and hope they'll get bored.  So I left it alone.  And that seemed to work for awhile.  Long enough, in fact, for a ravishing cleome to grow up through the broken gate. 

But the silence was shattered the other morning. 

When I arrived, it looked as though the gate had been blown off its hinges.  It had come to rest in a lilac bush about ten feet away...

Um, OK, you win. 

I mean, seriously.  If I were a ninja or something, but I'm just a gardener, people.  My fellow gardener Bruno, across the way, told me a couple years ago he'd had several break-ins and decided to lay an ambush, stay the night in his garden.  He said by an hour after dark he was about to pass out — he'd lost so much blood to the mosquitoes he had to call it a night. 

That's how it is with destructive energy.  It just sucks the good stuff out of you, and you have to nap all the next day to recover.  What do you get for your wasted time and trouble?  More of the same.  Some people argue that progress and civilization depend on this dynamic of creative and destructive forces, and that may be true — hey, I'm all for "creative destruction" — just not in my back yard.