{"id":1394,"date":"2007-10-04T06:36:35","date_gmt":"2007-10-04T11:36:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1394"},"modified":"2007-10-04T09:32:01","modified_gmt":"2007-10-04T14:32:01","slug":"a-law-unto-themselves-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1394","title":{"rendered":"A Law Unto Themselves"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve enjoyed this past few months, biking to work.\u00a0 Of course, biking is something that’s only intermittently tenable when my kids are in school – I can manage it once or twice a week (there’s a post in there), but it’s been a great thing for me.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

It didn’t teach me anything new about human nature, really; I used to bike a lot, and I ran into (figuratively) all the usual pathologies about urban traffic and raging drivers.\u00a0 Of course, I have always been something of a stickler about following traffic laws; something about not wanting to spend the rest of my life in a vegetative state, and ending up no better than a contributor to Dump Bachmann<\/em>… <\/a><\/p>\n

…but I digress.\u00a0 Like a lot of people, I’d not heard much about Critical Mass until last month, when the group’s monthly ride turned into a riot<\/a> in Minneapolis.\u00a0 I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild\/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).<\/p>\n

in Minneapolis.\u00a0 I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild\/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).in Minneapolis.\u00a0 I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild\/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).in Minneapolis.\u00a0 I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild\/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).in Minneapolis.\u00a0 I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild\/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).in Minneapolis.\u00a0 I bought the original “Critical Mass” line – that they were just a bunch of peaceful bikers, minding their own business, when (Pick One: The cops went wild\/a couple of outsiders started provoking people).According to yesterday’s column from Katherine Kersten<\/a>,\u00a0 I might have been wrong to be sanguine.\u00a0 Assumptions about Critical Mass’ benign-ness might be misplaced:<\/p>\n

They block traffic by “corking” — some riders hold cars at intersections during green lights while the mass passes through a red light. Others stand in the street and wave their bikes defiantly over their heads.<\/p>\n

Are you rushing to catch the last few innings of your son’s baseball game?<\/p>\n

Trying to get to the show you promised your wife for her birthday?<\/p>\n

Critical Mass doesn’t give a rip. Tough luck for you, Mac, because you’re a gas-guzzler and I’m living green.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So do we chalk this up to innocent adolescent posturing?\u00a0 Or, with 11 months until the Republican National Convention, is there something more sinister<\/a> to it?<\/p>\n

Why are Minneapolis police condoning this lawbreaking? Because the guys upstairs do. Two City Council members, Cam Gordon and Robert Lilligren, joined the Critical Mass mob on last week’s ride. Mayor R.T. Rybak also rode with the mob once several years ago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In August, after some of the ride’s rougher elements provoked a confrontation with police, and 19 people were arrested, Gordon, whose aide was one of those arrested<\/a>, called foul. The usual hand-wringing and internal investigation in the police department followed. Gordon organized a meeting, where police and Critical Mass representatives discussed what were called mutual expectations.<\/p>\n

Police Chief Tim Dolan says he doesn’t like expending limited police resources on Critical Mass rides. But support for more hard-nosed enforcement isn’t there, he says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words – in Minneapolis, the well-connected get a different brand of justice.<\/p>\n

It’d be interesting to see what’d happen if a right-to-life group, or Protest Warrior, interfered with traffic in Minneapolis.<\/p>\n

This breeds a sense of entitlement.\u00a0 Kersten notes…:<\/p>\n

Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs has studied protest movements. He points out that political protest has changed since the ’20s and ’30s, when those involved were usually poor…The ’60s and ’70s brought a sea change. For the middle- and upper-class young people who flooded into the streets, protest became a vehicle for self-assertion — the “politics of personal expression.” (Think Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.) Middle-class kids wore their arrest record as a badge of honor.In his psychological studies of ’60s-style radicals, Lichter discovered two revealing things: They scored high on the power scale, exhibiting a strong need to feel powerful. They also scored high on narcissism — the need to call attention to themselves, to get public notice.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, Lichter says, protesters often latched onto high-sounding motives to justify their self-absorbed actions. “You can’t take expressions of love for humanity at face value,” he explains. “They can serve as cover for aggressive feelings and tendencies.” A phenomenon like Critical Mass “allows people to act aggressively, while convincing themselves and some others that it’s all for a moral purpose.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The problem with tolerating – and even officially encouraging – this sort of self-absorbed adolescent posturing is that it breeds the same solipsistic sense of entitlement that we noted last summer in Kathleen Soliahs’ husband and daughter:<\/p>\n

\u201cShe lived in Berkeley,\u201d Emily [Olson, Soliah’s daughter] says, trying to explain her mother\u2019s affiliation with the SLA. \u201cIt was kind of normal.\u201d…says Fred. \u201cThe LAPD massacre of the SLA was a bellwether event-the first televised SWAT team -\u201d \u201cTeam murder,\u201d Emily interrupts…\u201cI always tell people she wasn\u2019t a terrorist. She was an urban guerrilla,\u201d says Emily, smearing Blistex on her lips while waiting for the waitress to return.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And, perhaps in parallel, much of official Saint Paul, acting unofficially, condoned Soliah, and continues to to this day.<\/p>\n

Minneapolis authorities eventually will discover what parents learn when they allow petulant children to break the rules “just to keep the peace.” You don’t get peace. You just open the door to bigger trouble.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s my only klinker with Kersten’s article.\u00a0 I wouldn’t use the “spoiled kid” analogy.<\/p>\n

A kid starts out with perfectly innocent motives; her parents do the spoiling.<\/p>\n

A better one; if you leave the door open, over and over again, even after being repeatedly burgled…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve enjoyed this past few months, biking to work.\u00a0 Of course, biking is something that’s only intermittently tenable when my kids are in school – I can manage it once or twice a week (there’s a post in there), but it’s been a great thing for me. It didn’t teach me anything new about human […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-days-of-adolescent-rage","category-minneapolis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1394\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}