You know me, I always try to look on the bright side. So when I read about those punks in Glens Falls riding their bikes around at all hours of the day and night weaving in and out of traffic and acting like sullen mouthy teenagers I think to myself, “well, at least they haven’t driven over a pedestrian and killed them” like we’ve seen in several recent hit and run fatalities.
I think, “isn’t it great that we have kids outside enjoying the fresh air, well, the Finch Paper air, and getting some exercise rather than sitting at home playing on their phones and chatting with on-line pedophiles.”
But the other side of me wants to get out of my car and grab those punks by the scruffs of their necks, one in each hand and shake some sense into them. But I don’t because that wouldn’t be a useful strategy, and it would be absolutely wrong and illegal. So I don’t and neither should anyone else under any circumstance.
What police and local officials are advocating is that when we see something we say something. In other words, call the cops and do not take the law into your own hands. Sure, we all feel like we know the best way to raise kids and clearly the parents of those kids aren’t as good parents as us, and we never did anything like light a fountain of burning sodium in water that burned holes on the high school stage that we had to fill with wood putty - and even if we had done anything like that it wouldn’t be a reflection on our own parents because of the universal admonition “don’t tell mom!” Which we never did, except that time we set the old shack in the woods on fire, put it out, and then having worked up an appetite went home for some tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches when Eddie asked, “Mrs Parwana, by any chance are you missing a pack of matches?” Technically speaking that wasn’t telling mom. Anyway it wasn’t anything as bad as blowing up the sheriffs dynamite shack like one particular parent I happen to know of. The point is all of us adults know better than those punk kids, and their parents need to get some remedial education in parenting.
I think we focus a lot of attention on kids we see performing behavior that in our eyes is questionable. It’s not new around here. For a while the bane of all existence in the drab and dreary Glens Falls of a couple decades ago where few businesses existed and nobody was out on the streets were the few skateboarders out getting exercise and fresh air. Those punks!
We wanted a welcoming town where kids could stay after they graduated from high school or college. But not if they were skateboarding punks who are “undesirable” in a community. We wanted those kids out of here! to make way for hordes of kids that could plausibly walk-on to a performance of “Up With People!”
Then there were the kids making movies on the street in giant superhero banana costumes. Thank god there was a cop on the scene to arrest them.
The thing is, kids out on the street attract attention since since hardly anyone else is out walking around. Most people are in cars and big trucks. We recognize people we know in public by the vehicle they drive because we don’t see people in the urban or suburban environment very often. People we don’t know are just vehicles, sedans, Jeeps, big trucks. Even motorcycles are de-anthropomorphized because the riders are all in some sort of motorcyclist costume.
Those cars, trucks and motorcycles are often seen weaving in traffic, cutting off people at intersections, pulling a “right on red” at 5 or 10 miles per hour, running stop signs and red lights, and in several cases recently running over pedestrians or bicyclists and driving off without calling police or the rescue squad.
But that’s vehicles, we have no control over them. Punk kids? We can do something about the outrage punk kids on bikes.