Post 72 - May 22, 2020
Day 72…
For Michael’s birthday last Sunday, my gift to him was a bicycle helmet and a membership to Citi Bike, New York’s bike sharing system.
We have been talking about bike riding for years.
When we lived in midtown, it never really came up, but as soon as we moved uptown, that changed.
Central Park is at the end of our block and there’s a Citi Bike stand right there and every single time we’ve walk past it on the way to the subway, some sort of conversation has arisen about the fact that we should join.
The day before yesterday, Michael and I took our first ride.
When I was a kid and living in suburban New Jersey, I lived on my bicycle.
I rode everywhere.
To school. To friend’s houses. To towns that were miles away.
Remember, this was a time when your mother would scoot you outside in the morning and tell you to come back for dinner when the town siren went off at 7.
We’d wander home when we were hungry, but basically, we spent the day out playing somewhere.
The whole day - on our own.
We’d play in each other’s yards or ride our bicycles three towns over.
For me, my bike was freedom. And adventure.
It let me dream about where I’d go when I grew up.
A few years ago, when we put JERSEY BOYS up in Holland, I was given a bicycle to get back and forth to rehearsal.
Amsterdam is a city made for bicycles.
There are bike lanes all through the city with their own traffic lights.
My young teenage self would have thrilled to be in that city.
While there, I lived just off of one of the canals - not far from the Anne Frank house.
The rehearsal studio was further out - a couple of miles away.
We had to ride through the city center and then out through a beautiful park to get to where we were working.
Riding every day, after all those years of living in New York, was glorious.
Even in the occasional rain.
These days in New York City, public transportation is more or less out of bounds.
For one thing, it is almost impossible to maintain social distancing on either busses or subways.
More importantly, however, essential workers have to travel to their jobs.
Since the rest of us don’t usually HAVE to go anywhere. Keeping off public transportation keeps THEM safer.
So, these last couple of months, I’ve been travelling on foot which has severely limited my range.
I can comfortably get about 50 blocks away and then home again.
That’s about 5 or 6 miles, round trip.
Manhattan is just over 13 miles long.
Now, with the bicycles, we can pretty much get anywhere on the island.
What on earth were we waiting for?
After our first ride in the Park on Wednesday, I noticed something.
Absolutely nobody riding a bike, follows the rules.
Citi Bike even prints the rules on the front of the bike where the rider can see them.
They aren’t hard to follow.
Bicycle riders need to yield to pedestrians, stay off the sidewalk, obey traffic signals and ride with the traffic.
Simple and easy to follow.
Additionally, in the Park, there are signs everywhere telling riders to dismount and walk their bikes on the paths.
Once you hit the main drive going through the park, all bike and scooter traffic is meant to flow in one direction.
There are even arrows painted on the asphalt pointing in the right direction.
For the most part, wheeled traffic in the Park does head in one direction.
For the most part.
There’s always somebody jogging or riding in the wrong direction.
People, though, ride on the paths all the time.
As for the traffic signals? Nobody pays any attention to them.
Nobody.
You are actually more of a hazard to other riders if you stop at a red light than if you just ride through.
If you stop, somebody will ram into you.
It’s the same out on the streets.
Riders are up on the sidewalks.
They go through lights.
They ride in the opposite direction.
The Oxford dictionary defines rules as “one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere.”
Almost none of us live completely alone.
We are social creatures and we form communities.
We agree on rules to help us navigate along with each other in those communities.
If everyone did exactly what they wanted, when they wanted, we'd be in constant conflict.
We have agreed that, in this country anyway, that rather than make the rules ourselves that we will select people to represent us who will make them for us.
We empower those people to come up with rules that allow us all to function together.
If we don’t like the rules that those people create, then we have the opportunity, periodically, to choose somebody else to represent us who might make rules more in line with how we, ourselves, would like to live.
When the people we choose don’t do what we want, we have the ability to un-choose them.
We have also agreed that we are freely allowed to complain about the rules and about the people we have empowered to make them.
Most importantly, though, we have agreed that until the rules change, we are not allowed to break them.
THEY don’t make the rules, WE do.
We choose who the THEY are.
WE are the THEY.
Now, there are rules we follow that are written down and rules that aren’t.
Sometimes, the rules we follow are in direct opposition to the rules that are in the books.
For example, New York pedestrians don’t wait for traffic signals to change before they cross.
We cross when the coast is clear, regardless of whether the light is green or not.
When you see somebody waiting at a street corner, following the rules, more likely than not, that person doesn’t live here.
I once got a ticket in Costa Mesa, California for jay walking.
Apparently, the people of Costa Mesa, as a community, had agreed to follow that rule.
Who knew?
Nobody jay walks in Tokyo either.
Even at night when there’s nobody around and no traffic.
People wait for the light to change.
People chafe at rules all the time and can decide that the ones they don’t like don’t apply to them.
I'm as guilty of this as anyone.
Remember though, in the broad picture, all of the rules that we live under are made with our input and our tacit approval.
We chose the representatives who made them.
Hopefully, before we chose them, we questioned that person and examined their past record to get an idea of the kind of rules they believe in.
We then had to take a leap of faith that they would continue to create similar rules once we chose them.
Sometimes, however careful we are, they don’t do what we want.
When that happens, we can, when the time comes, choose someone else.
If we don’t question that person beforehand or, even worse, don’t participate in the choosing of that person, then we have lost our ability to have a say in what results.
The CHOOSING of that person is where we get our say.
Once the person is chosen, our individual input is done.
We can complain but the person we chose now makes the rules.
That’s what we agree to when we decide to live in this community.
Not participating in the choosing of the person you want ALWAYS gives the advantage to the person you DON’T want.
Sometimes the choice is clear, but sometimes you don’t really like either person, so you have to choose the person you dislike the least.
None of the choices are ever perfect.
One of the flaws of our system is that the people who want to become our representatives inherently have to have large egos and a need for attention.
They want people to like them.
All of us are flawed in some way - that’s one of the things that make each of us who we are.
If you really dislike everyone out there, and you feel that nobody is representing exactly what you want, then you can always try and get chosen yourself.
This is what, we, as a country, as a specific community of people, have decided is the way we want to live together.
We can’t have everything we want, individually, every time.
We have agreed, as part of our social contract with each other, to compromise some of our wishes for the good of all.
These days, the people we have chosen to lead us are facing a crisis that is new to them.
Mistakes are being made. It’s inevitable.
These people are only human after all and this is a particularly complicated problem.
Some of the people who represent us are, however, failing quite badly.
We are coming up on a moment where we will have the opportunity to select other people to represent us at the highest level of our government.
Many of the people who are currently in those positions are trying to make rules that make it harder for anyone but them to be chosen.
This pandemic has shown that many of those who were picked to make our rules lack the skills and compassion necessary to make choices that really benefit us and keep us safe.
Choosing between different flawed human beings is never easy.
We have to think about what we really want and what will really benefit us, and then we have to find the person who we think comes closest to possibly being able to do that.
In the meantime, the people we have selected to make our rules in New York are asking us to keep social distancing measures in place and to wear masks.
That is the decision that WE as a community have decided will help us through this health crisis.
Did we decide to do that ourselves?
Not directly. We, however, chose people that we believe were like minded enough to make the decision in OUR names and they decided.
So, yes, in a way, we actually did decide to do that ourselves.
If you disagree with that rule, then, in a few months, you have the ability to try and choose someone who will make another rule.
For now, though, keeping away from each other and wearing a mask is what WE, through our representatives, have agreed to do.
You don’t need to follow any safety measures for yourself, but you have agreed, as a member of this community, to follow those safety measures for everybody else - whether you believe in them or not.
Yesterday, on my Citi Bike, I got all the way down to Astor Place which is about 4 ½ miles away from where I live.
I saw neighborhoods that I haven’t seen since this all started.
People seemed to be following the guidelines.
Those that weren’t, were not from any identifiable group - some were young, some were old, some were white some were of color, some looked rich and some looked poor.
As a group, though, they seemed to be in the minority.
Most of the people I passed, my fellow New Yorkers, seemed to be looking out for each other.
I don’t like wearing a mask and I’m sure nobody else does either.
If it MIGHT keep the people around me safe, then until the rule is made so I don’t have to, I can wear one.
Yes, I will continue to cross on the red, but only because, as a city, that is what we have agreed to do.
When I get back to Tokyo, though, I will stand on that flipping corner, for hours if need be, until the light changes, because that is what they have decided to do there.
For the moment, though, what I, myself, can do is apply for my absentee ballot.
THEY don’t make the rules, WE do.
We choose who the THEY are.
WE are the THEY.
And then I am going to go out and pick up a bike.