The crisis of authority and our common life

 What does this...

Scooter on sidewalk in Iowa

...have to do with this?

National Guard going apeshit in Oregon

This week, Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan published a blog post about the local controversy over motorized scooters. It's a good piece, which explains the conflicting and complementary interests involved, while gently calling out both those who heedlessly ride-and-dump their scooters and those motorists who claim an absolute right to unobstructed driving. We can accommodate the different interests, Ben argues, and become "a city of quiet streets, with strong local businesses, where we invest in our neighborhoods, and create locally."

I think we can recognize that there have been issues with the scooters, most of which is the bad behavior of a minority of scooter users, and a lack of cultural norms surrounding how they’re supposed to be used, while also realizing that the scooters can be a huge asset to our community.... We can learn, as a community, to park them properly, ride them in the bike lanes, and signal our turns. We can build rules and a culture around scooting that make scooting less annoying. We can build more bike lanes, so scooting is safer and more practical. We can scoot boldly into a brighter future, carried by the soft hum of an electric motor.

Ben sees the main obstacle to this happy resolution being cultural resistance to change, which is hard to argue with. We live in a state where bike lanes were weird just ten years ago, where demand for COVID-19 vaccines is so low we decline the vaccine shipments, and where passenger rail is a sign of creeping Eurocommunism. But beyond that, I worry about how "we can learn, as a community," to do anything. "How can I," asked the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:31, "unless someone guides me?"

Who is going to guide that boy away from scootering on the sidewalk, or tell that driver not to be aggressive in pedestrian areas (or the dog-walker to leash and pick up after their dog, or would-be DJs to turn down the music, or explosives enthusiasts to cool off the nightly fireworks, or...)?

Americans' obsession with individualism makes me skeptical that we're amenable to being guided towards norms. "If somebody had the swine flu right now, I would have them cough on me," bleated radio provocateur Glenn Beck in 2009. "I would do the exact opposite of what the homeland security says" (McNeil 2009). Republicans were then a third less likely than Democrats to say they would get the vaccine, and flu deaths by state that year rose with the percentage of Republicans (Kristof 2020, citing Baum 2011). That was eleven years before mask wearing became such a big deal.

It doesn't help that authority in America is in tatters. A new report from Pro Publica finds only ten confirmed cases of police officers being disciplined in several dozen documented incidents of excessive actions against protesters in 2020 (Simon 2021). One officer who punched a protestor six or eight times in six seconds received a written reprimand. Two fired Atlanta officers were subsequently reinstated. Weirdest of all, the National Guard, Minnesota State Patrol, and the Minneapolis Police Department all denied employing the officers who fired paint balls at someone's home.

The State of Iowa, predictably, backs the blue in a way that furthers rather than repairs the cultural rift. You don't build community by threatening people with fines and imprisonment. You build community by building public trust, and by taking accountability for your actions. For a short-term political jones, we and others across our nation have abandoned the tough but necessary work of building communities. In this environment, "the scooter problem" is not just an annoying blot on our day; it's a symptom of our collective inability even to be a community.