The weather’s gotten very fine here in Long Beach, and the bike path/jogging trail snaking across the beach between downtown and Belmont Shore is getting an increasing amount of traffic.
Most of the folks you’ll encounter on those few kilometers of pavement are just out for a stroll or some exercise, either perfectly sociable or minding their own business. But humanity is such that you can’t encounter a large sampling of people without coming across some turds, such as the pack teenagers I saw this past weekend.
There were about a half-dozen of them, all between the ages of 14 and 16, shirtless youths on decent bikes, including a couple of expensive fixies. And in their own small way they were terrorizing their fellow community members.
The game was to ride with a fast and controlled recklessness, careering all over the bike lanes, by design veering dangerously close to oncoming bicyclists and pedestrians as if they had lost control for a moment, with the aim of scaring them, which they did successfully a few times during the 10 seconds or so between my noticing their approach and their passing by.
These were bullies, bullies on bicycles. And like all bullies, their targets were those they perceived as clearly weaker than they — in this case, women, girls, and older men. None of the riders made a feint towards me, not because I cut an intimidating figure, but simply because I was attentive to their approach and looked like I might be able and willing to throw an elbow in self-defense had they swerved too close.
Short of defending oneself against a physical attack, this is the type of situation that most stokes whatever dormant, feral sympathies toward violence that exist in my 17%-hippie soul. Had I the means — say, a lance — the temptation to knock the worst offenders off their bicycles would have been not inconsiderable. I’m not saying knocking them from their mounts have been the right action (and I certainly would not have done it, even were I enough of a jousting fetishist to own a lance), but for many of us it’s hard not to feel that the most apposite response to aggression is aggression, since clearly that is a language every aggressor speaks, and because a bit of the old “eye for an eye” seems like just deserts.
Gandhi would certainly disagree. But Gandhi also would not have advocated the violent resistance against the naked and genocidal aggression of Nazi Germany, and as much as I admire the mahatma, I think he was dead wrong on in the case of Hitler and the Hitlerettes. One can, like Gandhi, claim that violence is wrong in every case, or one can allow for exceptions.
As much as I deplore violence, I allow for exceptions. Such was famous peacenik John Lennon’s sentiment in the original version of the song “Revolution” (which appears as “Revolution 1” on the White Album). “When you talk about destruction,” he sings, “don’t you know that you can count me out — in.” When asked about that final syllable, he replied that while he believed he was against violence, he wasn’t necessarily sure — an answer that fairly reflects the complexity of both the world without and the one within.
The only reason I bring Nazis into a discussion of our local bicycle bullies is to set parameters for our consideration of aggression. If there exist scenarios where it is acceptable to confront aggression with force, then the question is how and where to draw the over/under line, which will ultimately yield a formula that in its most basic form looks like:
If A > X, then CF; if A < X, then no CF.
(where A = aggression, CF = confront with force, X = the over/under)
I don’t claim to know how/where to draw the line, never mind having a formula to determine what sort of force and how much of it may be applied in a given case. But if you’re not Gandhi, the placement of the line seems necessary to consider every time aggression is forced upon us.
Force is a ubiquitous shadow in every society. No misnomer is in play when we refer to our “police force.” Ultimately all laws refer back to the possible implementation of some kind of force: If you engage in Y behavior, Z amount of force may be visited upon you.
One of the primary reasons for my belief libertarian belief that society ought to have as few laws as possible is that I am made very uncomfortable by the use of force. I do not relish the idea of anybody forcing anyone to do anything. Were it not that I have even less relish for a world in which the stronger can with impunity aggress and transgress against the weaker, I would advocate for no laws whatsoever. But humankind seems to be such that such a state of affairs is utopian (as in “cannot exist anywhere”).
Hence laws, and hence the use of force (or at least its threat) to deal with aggressors. Thus if a police officers (or even a lifeguard, perhaps) had happened to see the aggressive gaggle of teenagers, something might have been done on the spot.
But you know how it goes: “There’s never a cop around when you need one.” Police can’t be everywhere, of course. And so what to do when we average citizens are confronted with behavior like what I witnessed?
I have no illusions that philosophical considerations such as these will directly reach people like the bicycle bullies, at least not until they are both older and have taken up a new set of community interests. But perhaps more active and general societal censure toward those willing to engage in even minor forms of aggression can help. Humans are, after all, eminently social animals, among which only the truly psychotic and sociopathic are completely immune to reprobation from societymates.
I am confident these boys do not qualify as pycho- or sociopaths, and so I wish I’d had occasion to speak with them, to ask: Why do you want to scare people, to make people feel unsafe, to hurt their feelings? How would you feel if someone did to your sister or grandfather what you just did to that girl and that 70-year-old man? Is behaving like this really making your life any better or contributing to the type of world in which you want to live?
But they were gone before I had the chance, moving off down the path of contributing aggression to the world. In their wake the best I can hope for is that if ever I do have chances to have such conversations, I am willing to engage, and that as many of my fellow aggression-despising inhabitants of this life will do the same. Because if enough of us speak and reach out in our own small ways, it is bound to make a difference.
That difference may be small, but even the smallest minimization of aggression in the world is worth having, isn’t it?