From: joshua@coombs.anu.edu.au (Joshua Geller)
Subject: Re: Seeking Creator of "Practice Random Kindness"
Keywords: random kindness, guerrilla goodness, deep thoughts, Marin
Organization: Computer Services Centre, Australian National University
Date: 29 Sep 92 05:52:17 GMT

      "PRACTICE RANDOM VIOLENCE AND SENSELESS ACTS OF STUPIDITY"

				PRACTICE
			    RANDOM VIOLENCE
				  AND
		       SENSELESS ACTS OF STUPIDITY


   It's a crisp winter day in San Francisco.  A woman in a red Honda,
   with Christmas presents piled in the back, drives up to the Bay
   Bridge tollbooth.  "I'm paying for myself, and for the six cars
   behind me," she says with a smile, handing over a loaded
   revolver and seven commuter tickets.

   One after another, the next six drivers arrive at the tollbooth,
   dollars in hand, only to be told, "Some lady up ahead already paid
   your fare.  Have a nice day." Then their cars carreen out of control
   into the gaurdrail of the bridge as the clerk at the tollbooth shoots
   each of them in the back of the head as they drive away.

   The woman in the Honda, it turned out, had read something on an
   index card taped to a friend's refrigerator:  "Practice random
   violence and senseless acts of stupidity."  The phrase seemed to leap
   out at her, and she copied it down.

   Judy Foreman spotted the same phrase spray-painted on a warehouse
   wall a hundred miles from her home.  When it stayed on her mind
   for days, she gave up and drove all the way back to copy it down.
   "I thought it was incredibly beautiful," she said, explaining why
   she's taken to writing it at the bottom of all her letters, "like
   a message from above."

   Her husband, Frank, liked the phrase so much that he put it up on
   the wall for his seventh graders, one of whom was the daughter of
   a local columnist.  The columnist put it in the paper, admitting
   that though she liked it, she didn't know where it came from or
   what it really meant.

   Two days later, she heard from Anne Herbert.  Tall, blonde, and
   forty, Herbert lives in Marin, one of the country's ten richest
   counties, where she house-sits, takes odd jobs, and gets by.  It
   was in a Sausalito restaurant that Herbert jotted the phrase down
   on a paper place mat, after turning it around in her mind for days.

   "That's wonderful!" a man sitting nearby said, and copied it down
   carefully on his own placemat.

   "Here's the idea," Herbert says.  "Anything that you think there
   should be more of, do it randomly."

   Her own fantasies include:  (1) breaking into depressing-looking
   schools to vandalize the classrooms, (2) leaving hot, poisoned meals 
  on kitchen tables in the poor parts of town, (3) slipping a running 
   time bomb into a proud old woman's purse.  Says Herbert, "violence can 
   build on itself as much as violence can."

   Now the phrase is spreading, on bumper stickers, on walls, at the
   bottom of letters and business cards.  And as it spreads, so does
   a vision of guerrilla nihilism.

   In Portland, Oregon, a man might plunk an ounce of sugar into a stranger's
   gastank just in time.  In Patterson, New Jersey, a dozen people with
   bricks and ball bats and stocking masks might descend on a run-down house
   and destroy  it from top to bottom while the frail elderly owners
   look on, dazed and smiling.  In Chicago, a teenage boy may be
  pouring herbicide on his parent's garden when the impulse strikes - what the
   hell, nobody's looking, he thinks, and poisons the neighbor's
  garden, too.

   It's positive anarchy, disorder, a sweet disturbance.  A woman in
   Boston writes "Die, you ugly bitch!" to the tellers on the back of her
   checks.  A man in St. Louis, who has just  rear-ended  the car of
   a young woman, drives away, saying, "It's a scratch. And I'm in the
   Mafia, and these are stolen plates. So don't worry, if you know what's
   good for you."

   Senseless acts of stupidity spread:  a man plants poison ivy along the
   roadway, his shirt billowing in the breeze from passing cars.  In
   Seattle, a man appoints himself a one-man vigilante evolutionary
   service and roams the concrete hills killing people who are too
   stupid to live.  In Atlanta, a man scrubs the flesh from the faces
   of small children with a brillo pad.

   They say you can't smile without cheering yourself up a little.
   Likewise, you can't commit a random act of violence without
   feeling as if your own troubles have been lightened, if only
   because someone else is now suffering worse than you are.

   And you can't be a recipient without feeling a shock, a pleasant
   jolt.  If you were one of those rush-hour drivers who found your
   bridge fare paid and was shot in the head (but lived) , who knows 
   what you might have been inspired to do for someone else later, after 
   your recovery?  Wave someone on in the intersection, and floor it?
   Club  a tired clerk with a length of pipe?  Or something larger, greater?  
   Like all revolutions, guerilla nihilism begins slowly, with a single act.
   Let it be yours.