A strange, convoluted graffiti has suddenly appeared on light poles throughout the Civic Center.
The hasty scrawl features "LIVE To GIVE" on the left and "GIVE TO LIVE" on the right bracketing "1 = WHAT YOU DO [divided by] TIME." This is followed by a list of "1=you, 1=me, 1=us, 1=All, 1=GOD Any Time All The Time."
Checking around the internet, there seem to be quite a few organizations using some variation of "Live To Give/Give to Live" in their marketing slogans, from a Dearborn, Michigan internet charity, to a fundraising bike ride from Vancouver, BC to Austin Texas...
...to New Age hucksters Dr. Rick Barrett and Dr. Joe Vitale with their book "Give to Live: The Real Secret to Manifesting Life's Rewards."
My bet, though, is on a Christian cult founded in Boston in the 1960s called the International Churches of Christ, which focuses on evangelizing in college campuses and among youth groups. (Click here for a "Cult Alert!" about the organization.)
The logo for their third annual International Conference for Youth & Family Ministry, to be held in Los Angeles this April, can be seen above. Muslim extremists in America are not particularly worrying. It is the strange, splintered Christian sects all over this nation that have always struck me as toxic, with their paranoid, apocalyptic theologies uneasily allied to a deeply repressive Old Testament morality.
4 comments:
This guy started with his sharpie nonsense earlier in 2010 up on Van Ness, and went nuts late in the year marking every other lamp post around the Tenderloin and Civic Center.
Not part of any group, just another weirdo/creep on the streets.
Dear Sam: Thanks for the update/clarification.
Mike: had to comment here... this type of rhyming/verbal stew is often a symptom of schizophrenia and other psychotic states. I've experienced it myself with bipolar disorder before I was diagnosed over ten years ago. My thing was "Like = Love" which I still kind of believe. Off a website about this:
Loose associations – Rapidly shifting from topic to topic, with no connection between one thought and the next.
Neologisms – Made-up words or phrases that only have meaning to the patient.
Perseveration – Repetition of words and statements; saying the same thing over and over.
Clang – Meaningless use of rhyming words (“I said the bread and read the shed and fed Ned at the head").
sorry your kitty lost that contest, btw. Cheers, Grove
Dear Grove: Interesting observation, which reinforces Sam's noting above that it's being done by an insane street person. What's curious is how many other supposedly non-insane orgs are using the same rhyme-time slogans as our tagger.
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