Journalism isn't a real major. You're too quiet. I worry that you'll never get married. Women can't be engineers. Is that a weave you have on? Iron my shirt. Pot-smoking hippy. Fags have AIDS.
Give up.
Paint hate on bricks, and build a wall to tear it down.
Throw cinder blocks against one another. Destroy what others have said so that you may somehow say something.
I went to the Writing on the Wall Project's closing ceremony Friday afternoon at the Plaza of the Americas, trying again to figure out a phenomenon I first observed two years ago.
I didn't write on the wall, nor did I build the wall. I only came to watch it fall and to search for meaning. The concrete dust in the air irritated my lungs and my eyes, so I exhaled and covered my face.
My first reaction was poetic - a metaphor about trying to protect myself from the harshness of hateful language. But, in truth, something in my mind chuckled at everybody breaking bricks - it appeared to be a meaningless rite of destruction and rebirth.
I saw violence, not only in the words on the wall, but in the wall's destruction. It would be trite to infer a fire-fighting-fire solution.
Human existence is perpetuated by violence from conception to death. However, I don't think the wall is the solution to intolerance, nor do I think it was the project's intent. But I still saw violence.
So I thought about disregarding the Writing on the Wall Project for contradicting itself.
These terms stand out from the program distributed at the project's closing ceremony: prejudice, disrespect, oppression, intolerance, stereotyping, hate, hurt.
They help explain what the wall's paint represents, and there are as many definitions for these terms as there are words on the wall.
Hurt is the one term that seems to link all the wall's negativity together. The idea of hurt, pain or suffering is subjective and based on a person's tolerance. What hurts one person may be innocuous to another.
Furthermore, the fact that pain exists is as universal as the reality that we all need food to survive or the knowledge that we're all going to die.
To continue the analogy, immortality is as impossible a notion as is a world without pain.
So I came closer to disregarding the Writing on the Wall Project because it seemed unnecessary and self-indulgent.
But this hurt, the hurt the wall displayed last week, doesn't come from nature or from bad luck. This hurt is delivered by fellow members of humanity.
At first, the wall seemed meaningless.
Perhaps the process was cathartic, but what was it doing to address any of society's problems, such as crime, racism, discrimination, injustice or intolerance?
But then it hit me: The wall appearing meaningless actually informs its meaning. Just as words are harmless symbols without a speaker or context, the wall is a meaningless symbol if we don't actively define it.
And that's where it derives tangible power.
The wall says nothing until we say something about it. More importantly, the wall does nothing until we do something about what it says.
Vincent Massaro is a journalism senior. His column appears on Mondays.
