The bridge connecting Lewiston’s Railroad Park and Auburn’s Bonney Park is a path of illustrated profanity and violence.

It’s a path traveled by dozens of people every day and it’s an utterly poor reflection of the cities’ image.

Lewiston and Auburn have each devoted loads of tax and grant dollars to create and maintain parks along the river for citizens and visitors to use and enjoy. It’s pretty tough to fully enjoy that use, especially with young children, with the connecting bridge peppered with spray-painted obscenities.

Especially disturbing along this path is an anatomical rendering of a woman with a fist smashing violently into her groin.

What’s a child to make of that image?

The cities can not track down and instantly repair the crime of every vandal, but this bridge is an extremely visible connector for the cities and in near constant use. If the cities cannot tend to the spray paint immediately, this might be a project for a local Scout troop. Or, better yet, for a middle or high school civil rights team to tackle hate outside their school.

It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to make repairs using a Navy boat gray paint to hide the graffiti. It wouldn’t take a terribly long time, and it would be a tremendous act of righting a wrong.

Maybe Lewiston-Auburn, as well, should follow in the footsteps of South Portland, which earlier this year passed a strict anti-graffiti ordinance, which stiffened the penalties for spray-painted vandalism. The ordinance is about graffiti prevention, instead of reaction, and gives police the authority to ticket people carrying “graffiti implements.”

Under this ordinance, the phrase “We’re not doing anything wrong, officer,” loses its power. If a group of persons are seen toting spray paint, or other items, around town with the obvious intention of bestowing their improvisational art form on public or private property, police can rightfully stop them.

Or, perhaps Portland has the right answer. The city has a designated place for graffiti “artists” to ply their trade, a “can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach that could easily be transferred to Lewiston-Auburn.

One thing is clear: the current scourge of graffiti, such as what’s visible on the bridge spanning the Androscoggin River, is intolerable. Its imagery is harmful and disturbing, and needs immediate removal.

Every day the graffiti is permitted to linger, is another day the Twin Cities and its citizens say hate and violence do not matter.