A Case Of The Mondays

I knew that it was going to be ugly when I rounded the corner and saw our school's recycling dumpster pushed up against one of our portable classrooms. The last time someone had made the effort to move the rather large, white rolling bin, it had been used as a stepladder for reaching the chain basketball nets on our playground. It had been put to much the same use this morning, only this time the perpetrators were not interested in stealing equipment from an elementary school kids' playground. This time they were more concerned with ransacking a kindergarten class.
Upon closer inspection, it became apparent that these master criminals had first tried to gain entry by dumping all the potted flowers that we had recently placed around our campus and stacking the pots up to reach the window. When that proved to be too short, they went for the dumpster. That brought them easy access to the wire mesh that covered the window, which they peeled back before they smashed the glass. And once they got in, what do you suppose they got? They unplugged the computers, but that seemed beyond their meager capacity, so they tossed the personal copier out onto the asphalt.
They didn't take much. They seemed content just to break stuff. They were probably scared off by the arrival of the custodian, who spent the better part of her morning trying to put things back into some sort of order. The kindergarten class got to meet in the library today, and for those kids it probably seemed like a special treat. For the rest of us who dealt with the debris and filed it with the ever-growing list of stories about break-ins and vandalism, we just kept moving and tried not to think about it too much. We tried not to think about it because when we did, we got angry, and anger is what made that mess happen in the first place.
Tonight when I was riding up the hill, I noticed a scattering of plastic debris on the sidewalk next to the side gate of the school. It was the remnants of the CD player, the one thing that we had assumed the vandals had taken for themselves. They hadn't. Instead they had hurled it over the fifteen foot chain link fence to the street below. It won't be used to play music or story tapes again. It won't even be sold to buy drugs. It's going to end up in the dumpster right next to the recycling bin. We'll get the window fixed, and buy a new CD player, and we'll start over again. And even though we ache for some sort of frontier justice, some sort of clue that will send the idiots who did this to jail, we know that we will have to be satisfied with the knowledge that our kids are safe and no one got hurt. But we can dream, can't we?