From: oispeggy@ubvmsd.cc.buffalo.edu (Peggy Brown)
Newsgroups: alt.magick,alt.pagan,alt.religion.all-worlds
Subject: Re: Seeking Creator of "Practice Random Kindness"
Keywords: random kindness, guerrilla goodness, deep thoughts, Marin
Date: 29 Sep 92 13:25:00 GMT
Organization: University at Buffalo
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41
Followup: sci.philosophy.meta

This has nothing to do with magick either...
..but at least was better than the sappy version.

- Peggy -


In article <joshua.717745937@coombs>, joshua@coombs.anu.edu.au (Joshua Geller) writes...
> 
>      "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.