Knuckleheads

I grew up in Madison, Ct, which was a shipbuilding center in early times, then became a summer resort and increasingly, a bedroom community. Probably the best thing about Madison is its town beaches, and especially the Surf Club. It has ball fields and basketball courts, and a big event hall where they have dinners and dances and youth activities. You can have your wedding reception or your fundraiser there. That's where all the kids hang out in the summer and it's what makes Madison a town, basically.

I had a summer job as manager of the concession stand -- hamburgers and hot dogs, ice cream, soda, snow cones. We had a very popular fried pizza. Snow cones were where the profit was -- a cup of ice and some syrup, and we got IIRC 75 cents for them. It would be a lot more now. It was a responsible, hard job for a kid -- I started after my senior year in high school and did it for a couple more years when I was in college. One day I got to work and found that some morons had broken in and trashed the place. Why?

I don't know but it happened again. This time they didn't just trash the concession stand:

Vandals blocked the sinks and toilets and left the water running, opened the staff refrigerator and took whatever food was inside and threw it across the kitchen floor, turned over trash, and did a fair amount of damage outside as well.

The vandals sliced up the new tent on the Surf Club patio. That tent cost the town thousands of dollars and had only been in place for about six weeks.

“They took the lighting off their hangers and pilled them up all along the seawall along with the two propane tanks, the high chairs, they flipped some tables over that were chained, and they pulled [the concession stand] menus off the side of the building that he has on the left and right,” said Erskine. “Then they defecated on [the stand’s] service counter on the outside.”

The difference now is that they have surveillance cameras. If you go to the link you will get a very clear look at these bozos. You can scroll  through the photos by clicking on the arrows and see how much they are enjoying themselves and how smug they look. In one shot, one of them is holding a beer. They don't look all that young either -- maybe college age. I haven't read yet that they've been arrested but obviously it's only a matter of time.

So what's the psychology of this? For some reason they want to strike at the whole community, ruin everybody's good time for the next day, and it makes them happy. Yeah, the surveillance cameras everywhere are kind of disconcerting, but this time I'm glad they were there.