Stop Thief
The brief kerfuffle about “microlooting” (shoplifting) by privileged, anticapitalist young white beneficiaries of capitalism, and now this post about a Walgreen’s accused of racism for installing antitheft devices, brought to mind a routinely witnessed New York City (and probably just big-American-city) phenomenon: young Black men jumping subway turnstiles. This has become so inexorable and unremarkable, ignored as a mere fact of life by everyone including subway personnel, that I imagine young Black men in certain subcultures would be ashamed to pay the fare in front of their peers. I think of this cynically as “collecting their reparations one subway fare at a time.”
Not that there’s anything particularly noble about paying—or not paying!—your subway fare. While politicians on the Right continue to trumpet the morality of enterprise and those on the Left to revere the compassion of the state, the fact is that both official institutions and commercial enterprises have lost most of their societal assent. Corporations and governments behave so badly that many citizens, especially young adults who’ve just matured into this mess, see no reason why they should behave well. Aren’t you just a simp if you do, when there’s nothing in it for you? When the powers that be abuse their stakeholders in the impersonal pursuit of profit and graft?
Entitled grievance versus corrupt indifference—two wearisome features of a society that has come apart.
Some socialists have suggested that mass transit should be free to board and paid through taxes. Sort of like street lights. You don't put a nickel in the base of a lamppost as you pass it. (I stole this example from David McReynolds.) I left NY a cuppla decades ago. I don't know if this is still a prospect. Of course, we'd lose a reason to dump on fare jumpers.