A letter to the editor here in South Bend painted a vivid picture of a troubled part of town. Where once there had been tidy, prosperous blocks of houses and shops, now whole buildings were missing or had fallen into disrepair, and a new indignity, ugly, sometimes frightening graffiti, was blooming on garage walls and street signs and overpasses. I could feel the powerlessness in that long-time resident’s voice. Things were out of control. Something had plainly broken in our community.

I remember visiting New York in the worst of its graffiti days, when nearly every surface of a subway car, inside and out, would be covered with scrawled names and illegible slogans and, it’s true, occasional masterpieces of imaginative and even beautiful art. But the overall effect was, for me, anyway, to feel pressed down by a stranger’s angry and troubled imagination. On the subway we rode along inside someone’s nightmare, inside someone’s scream.

We get graffiti in our neighborhood, too, mainly down at the railroad bridge. One of the neighbors paints over any new tags as soon as he sees them, so they don’t last long. I’m grateful for his efforts to keep those troubling voices at bay. When we first moved in, nobody looked after the bridge, and for several years a simple line drawing of a hanging and a brutal slogan expressing nostalgia for the lost days of lynching stayed in plain view by the sidewalk where the young people passed each day on their way to high school.

Nowadays, on the news, when I see protestors at some political event holding up angry, inarticulate signs, or when I catch a few minutes of the badgering and venting style of talk radio favored by some of our fellow citizens, I think to myself: that right there is graffiti. Those ugly words on the protest signs, those bitter phrases of ridicule flowing from the famous radio hosts—those are graffiti on the airwaves. Something much larger than a neighborhood or a part of town is broken. In a time of growing national frustration, we are becoming a graffiti society.

I started thinking about that problem during the last local election, that time of the civic season when, in theory, we all get to speak up. Sometimes voting doesn’t feel like a very clear or powerful kind of speech, though, and yard signs send pretty generic messages, too. The most common ways that citizens participate in democracy can seem downright feeble. Certain graffiti writers, oddly enough, manage to construct stronger, or at least louder, voices than the average citizen does. And that’s not a good sign, is it?

My interest in graffiti was stirred by a striking portrait of a blue-faced man stenciled last year on a downtown wall. The mouth was x-ed out, and underneath was printed this question: “Where is your voice?” It struck me that the writer had a point. So I went looking for clues to what the most interesting of these writers are up to. To my surprise, I discovered that some of them would probably agree with the recent letter to the editor. They too think something in our society is broken, and they want a place to speak. The British graffiti artist Bansky, for example, said that “The city shouldn’t just be a one-way conversation.”

The newest graffiti down at our nearby bridge was among the few beautiful ones I’ve seen there. Against the gray wall, bold white letters stood more than a yard tall. Vividly outlined in red, they spelled out the word “Heist.” This was provocative. Was it a threat to come back and break into a house or two? Or maybe the writer believed that something vital has been stolen from him or from all of us? It felt, somehow, vaguely, very meaningful. But that strong, uncertain word has been painted over now, and of course the writer vanished. We can’t ask him, we can’t talk it over, so we’ll never know.