Column for this weekend on my Substack app.
JOSEPH HAMRICK
MAY 18, 2024
I recently purchased a newer translation of Augustine’s Confessions, a masterful autobiography that searches the depths and heights of the human soul in its running from and searching for God.
It reminded me of a column I wrote, nearly five years ago now, while on vacation in Kentucky at the Ark Encounter. I wrote and typed away then while Jesse was learning a new addiction – playing the game NERTS with my siblings.
Here is what I wrote then. I think it is apt for today as well.
The boys wove through the rows of headstones and flowers that adorned them, tagging indiscriminately with blue spray-paint the names of people long dead and recently buried.
This place, Rosemound Cemetery in Commerce, where the bodies of the once-living are helpless to protect, was invaded by two (as far as we can tell) boys who came not to mourn, but to desecrate the headstones of the dead.
Many, if not most, crimes can be logically understood. Stealing food to feed one’s family, though wrong, still evokes sympathy from me when I read of their arrest in the newspaper or my Face 
book newsfeed. Vandalism, however, elicits other emotions. The crime serves no practical purpose except to please the heart of the vandal. To steal a car at least serves a practical purpose: though in the wrongful hands, the car is still being used according to its purpose. To slash its tires serves no purpose. The car can no longer be used by neither the thief nor its rightful owner.
This story caused me to recall another instance of pure vandalism, of committing a crime, not to serve some practical end, but to commit a crime for the sake of doing something wrong.