A viewer asks: “The City of Montreal recently invested many millions of dollars to rebuild the freeway system in the South Central part of the main island, including the Turcot exchange. The old infrastructure was losing its integrity and a major eyesore for its design, and over the years graffiti built up. The new construction has beautiful concrete in a beautiful shade, and is a tremendous improvement. However, the graffiti “artists” came back with a vengeance and have seriously marred everything. The city has tried some mitigation efforts to cover it but it has come back terribly over the winter and they can’t keep up. Similarly, trash is dropped everywhere. How can this problem be addressed?”

This problem is truly no different than all problems involving perpetrators and victims. If you want to protect the victims in the best possible way, it is necessary to heal the perpetrators so they no longer engage in harmful conduct. This solves the dilemma and the uncertainty about to what extent the divine can intercede to deflect or even block the actions of a perpetrator, versus honoring their free will choices to do harm and letting the Law of Karma deal with it, eventually, even though that would likely mean some are victimized in the near term and the comeuppance to the perpetrator might not even happen in the current lifetime. So taking an active role in what you want for your city through asking for healing, is the very best measure you can use, as governments are increasingly reluctant to work hard on such things because they lack the wherewithal and are always doing a political calculation about how it might look for them to attack and punish the little guy, in this case so-called artists exhibiting their desire to express themselves freely, even though there are nuisance laws they would be breaking. So we are not saying to avoid actions in the physical as a citizen, to work the levers within the system, but that you also have a divine resource that can be brought to bear as well. This can be used to inspire and motivate those in authority, to seek a greater benefit for all in promoting safety and beauty that results from having things orderly and maintained, to keep areas clean and unblemished as an exhibition of civic pride and an emblem of civic duty being honored as an example to all.