The mystery of the vanishing graffiti

On my way to homegroup tonight, I passed the row of billboards on Clarence Drive, and one of them bore the imposed message “GET THE ASIANS OUT” scrawled across in red aerosol paint.

It made me very angry and sad. Clearly a response to the attempted bombing of Glasgow airport, some people think the solution is to clear out an entire swathe of our population. Besides being immoral and racist (never mind a recipe for economic, political and societal anarchy), it ignores the fact that the perpetrators were not Scots Asians (or even a tiny unrepresentative minority of them), but very recent migrants (and a tiny unrepresentative minority, in turn, of them).

I despair of the ignorance racism, and when I got to homegroup I told everyone about it, and we all prayed for a healing of racist thought and protection for the city’s Asian community.

On the way home, I passed the same row of billboards… and the graffiti had gone.

I stood staring for a good few minutes, trying to figure out what had happened, and as I studied the giant car advertisement I must have looked like a gormless example of the power of advertising in today’s consumerist society.

Instead, I was looking for evidence of someone having cleaned the racist abuse off, painted over it, or defaced it. But I couldn’t find anything. It had vanished without trace. As if it had never been there before.

Strange. But reassuring.

Racism can vanish if we want it to.

6 thoughts on “The mystery of the vanishing graffiti

  1. All hail Glasgow City Council.

    They have normal response times for normal grafitti, and super-whizzy-fast response times for the really nasty stuff.

    AND they light up bridges in cool colours, how good is that?!

    Not that I’m biassed or anything..

    šŸ™‚

  2. I phoned the council hotline a couple of months ago about some graffiti near our unit. I was about to add a post complaining that it hadn’t been cleared yet, but looked out the window, and – It’s gone!

    I’m not sure when it was cleared, I’d never noticed it until now.

    Whilst I’m pleased the graffiti’s away, there are many, many other things wrong with Glasgow City Council, and it’ll take more than some nicely lit bridges to make up for it…

  3. It is possible to change the world
    having children of all ethnic groups and religions attend the same schools
    would be the beginning. As long as children are separated people will remain divided.
    Racism is a word I don’t like it implies that one group of human beings are of a different race to another group of human beings when there is only one human race.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *