The prospect of community is lost when its members are indifferent to societal norms and even hostile to law and order.
There is, perhaps, no more relatable case of this than transit-fare evasion. I take the train five days a week to go into the NR/NRI offices, and the societal scourge of turnstile-hopping and other forms of fare evasion has become omnipresent.
At one midtown station, for example, there is always a homeless man holding the security door open for commuters, with the intention of collecting a few bucks in tips for his selfless, if illegal and immoral, service. I, perhaps naively, always hope that people will shun him and pay the $2.90 fare, but many walk right through that security door, indifferent to the broader societal effects of such a practice.
While fare evasion may seem trivial to some, it is, in fact, emblematic of a decline in trust, respect, and community obligation.
I commend Nic Rowan for his recent piece in the American Conservative on this very issue. Rowan admits that he himself was a fare-hopper:
I don’t know when I stopped paying for the Metro. High school, I guess. My rationale at first was that I had no money, and in those days it was easy to get on the train without paying for it. You didn’t even have to jump the turnstile. All you had to do was wait until someone else paid, and then you could walk very quickly behind him before the automatic gates closed.
Rowan goes on to write that fare-hopping was not his only petty crime:
Soon, I began to approach all sorts of little things with this kind of Huck Finn logic. I found myself nicking coffee cups, beer glasses, and bread plates from restaurants. I took old street signs, defunct newsstands, unused office furniture. Of course, I never took anything of much value. That would be real theft, or so I told myself.
So, while jumping the turnstile every so often may seem like no big deal, the act may very well sow the seeds of societal indifference within you. As the article’s subhead reads, “If everyone is behaving badly, things fall apart.” That is exactly right. But, if we as a society do not punish petty crimes like fare evasion — which, as of now, we are not — then things continue to deteriorate.
According to a report released earlier this month by the Citizens Budget Commision (CBC), “In 2023, the cost to the MTA alone was more than $700 million — an amount equal to the amount of funding that would be raised through two rounds of fare hikes.”
You read that right, $700 million. It’s sad social commentary, to say the least.
We must restore respect, civility, and community obligation, not only in New York, but across the country. As the late Amitai Etzioni wrote in his 1999 book The Limits of Privacy, “. . . we are not just rights-bearing individuals, but community members who are responsible for each other.”
We would be wise to heed Etzioni’s words.