We went to dinner with friends on a Sunday afternoon at a restaurant beside Albuquerque's Central Avenue. Sitting in the restaurant's outdoor patio gave us front row seats to the parade of motorcycles and cars with disabled mufflers which goes on day and night through the weekend. At times the noise drowned out our conversation.
Of course the conversation turned briefly to the passing spectacle. Our dinner host, who spent most of his life in law enforcement, observed that the police really could not do anything to quiet the noise given the priority to deal with the torrent of violent crime which besets the city. I had to agree, though I suggested that making a noise check part of the yearly vehicle inspection might lower the volume a little bit.
Another source of day and night cacophony we are all subjected to now is the endless stream of political ads aimed at convincing voters who should next represent them at the local, state and national levels. The Republican candidates in particular assure us that they will clamp down on crime by hiring more police and locking up more offenders. Just as assuredly, close to half the voting population will forget that such promises have been made every year since the beginning of Time with no demonstrable effect on crime rates.
I think it is worthwhile to spend some time thinking about who the people are that are racing their noisy machines around the city. It is a challenge to come up with a convincing profile of the group members, though they seem to constitute a significant portion of the population. Newscasters occasionally show clips of the police trying to cope with congregations of street racers and bystanders to little effect. However, I don't recall anyone trying to interview the participants with an eye toward understanding the motivations behind the behavior. I suppose some academic researchers - perhaps a novelist - have undertaken such a project; I'll try to look for some of that.
Meanwhile, it seems safe to conclude that an adrenaline rush abetted by some substance abuse is fundamental to the perpetuation of the machine-related noise pollution, and that it is greatly facilitated by cell phones and social networks. Beyond the organizational particulars, I suspect that the noisy drivers and their sympathizers are simultaneously enjoying a defiance of authority and proclaiming solidarity with a like-minded if rather ill defined social group.
I will speculate further that the social group in question includes many individuals left behind by our society's tolerance for an economic order that has concentrated wealth in the hands of a tiny elite at an ever increasing rate over the past half century. Feelings of powerlessness, desperate gestures of defiance, political movements characterized by grievance, racism and xenophobia, and support for authoritarian regimes are some of the possible outcomes. Whac-a-mole tactics are not the answer to complex antisocial behaviors.
3 comments:
"enjoying a defiance of authority and proclaiming solidarity with a like-minded if rather ill defined social group". I see this here with a certain demographic running through stop signs, even on populated residential streets. I suppose they feel powerful doing something that is against the law, even though what it really does is make them look infantile and stupid.
I see the noise-making street racers in pretty much the same way. On the other hand, I'm not really comfortable classifying their behavior as antisocial, though it certainly exhibits a lack of empathy. I tend to see the Trumpers in the same way; their behavior is consistent with the group with which they identify.
"consistent with the group with which they identify." What you may be politely saying is they are letting their inner douchehead out and proud of it.
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