Head for the bunkers, kids on bikes are back
Performative stupidity reaches apex with chainsaw-man
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Kids threw snowballs at cars in the 1970s on Park Avenue in Saranac Lake, where I spent my pre-adolescent and early teen years.
Not every day and not every kid, but it happened. I was a witness and, occasionally, a perpetrator.
Years later, I discovered how loud and scary a hard-packed snowball is when it smacks into your car door or explodes across your windshield while you’re driving.
I saw drivers, back in the Park Ave. days, who slid to a stop on the snowy road and leapt out of their cars and screamed with rage after a direct hit on their car.
Throwing snowballs at cars is wrong and bad and at least a little bit dangerous. Frightened drivers could have swerved off the road or even into another car, although, thankfully, I never saw or heard about anything like that happening.
It was 50 years ago I was taking my mittens off so I could pack hard snowballs on Park Ave. But has there ever been an era in which have kids of that age have refrained from foolish and anger-provoking behavior?
Most grown-ups I’ve spoken with about their youth seem to enjoy looking back on long-ago escapades. But the smiles fade when we’re the targets .
Some of us fantasize about maiming the reckless brats.
If you’re looking for a shot of elder rage, check out the discussion on the Greater Glens Falls NY Community Chat Facebook page about kids misbehaving on bikes.
“Well we sit here and complain about this problem yet we are the adults who say we can’t do anything about children being disruptive, hello I was born in the 70’s , I know exactly what needs to be done , and yall gonna take mouthy kids yelling at you ? Wait till they come my way,” says one commenter.
“I agree with your philosophy.... if we harassed some adult that adult would whoop our ass and bring us home to have our bases whooped again by our parents. They come in my lane I refuse to veer or brake.... fuck around and find out is how I was raised,” says another.
I don’t recall the 1960s and ‘70s as a time when adults were beating up and running over young teens.
Some kids have always gotten “whooped” at home, then and now, and no one benefits from that.
I’d ignore all the inflammatory rhetoric and braggadocio, except it’s been going on for a few years now in various forums — the Chronicle has dined out on the subject — and some sensible people seem to be caught up in the narrative that youthful bike gangs are a local crisis.
Kids popping wheelies in traffic and weaving between cars and cutting people off is bad, wrong, illegal and dangerous. But right now in this country, people who have done nothing wrong are being grabbed on the street by government agents in workout clothes, pulled into cars and whisked off to detention centers in Louisiana. Teens hogging the road and flipping off motorists are way down on our list of troubles.
The first time I saw a kid riding a wheelie all the way down the Glen Street sidewalk, as Bella and I watched from a table in front of Spot Coffee, I thought it was cool, like a circus act.
Before the kids on bikes, we had kids on skateboards, swerving from the sidewalks to the roads, doing tricks on people’s steps and railings, damaging private property and breaking their own wrists and ankles.
Some kids still throw snowballs at cars.
Let’s save up our rage at the insolent bikers and direct it at a far larger and more important target — the attention-seeking adolescent who somehow got elected president.
How I wish the only thing we had to be frightened of and furious about was a gang of fresh-faced kids on bikes with big tires.
Very large headline
Another inflation of a local event caught my eye this past week, when I saw the Post-Star’s e-edition for Wednesday, which featured a massive headshot of Thomas Howard, under a headline in a size normally reserved for the death of a president or declaration of war.
“Police ID chainsaw-wielding man arrested at protest,” it says, in two big lines that run all the way across the top of the front page.
We might have played this story on the front page 10 or 15 years ago, when I worked at the Post-Star, but it would have been in a single column down a rail, with a small headshot, or tucked into a bottom corner.
Howard was apparently walking around with a chainsaw that was running during one of the numerous anti-Trump rallies. I haven’t seen any reports that he got close to other people with the chainsaw or threatened to use it on anyone.
He has been charged with a couple of minor crimes, and I bet he won’t see a day in jail.
His performance was both scary and stupid, and it was massively overplayed in the media, so it was, in all respects, a perfect distillation of the Trump movement.
Flowering trees
This is the time of year of flowering trees in Glens Falls, and they are lovely.
Chris Churchill is completely wrong
Times-Union columnist Chris Churchill opined this week that Elise Stefanik could beat Kathy Hochul in a race for governor if she decides to run. He’s wrong. The old Elise Stefanik, the one with a moderate voting record who occasionally showed up in her district and talked to people who lived there, would have had a chance against a weak Democratic candidate like Kathy Hochul. The new Elise Stefanik, who proclaimed herself ultra-MAGA, who shuns local press (except for Mark Frost), who urges a punitive investigation into one of her own local school districts, who supports the seizure and deportation of migrants upon whom local farmers depend and embraces the man now busy wrecking the U.S. economy and its rule of law does not have a chance. The swelling anti-Trump tide will by next fall be a tidal wave of anger. Stefanik won’t run for governor, because she will understand by then that she will lose.
I didn’t experience the Elon Musk cosplayer with the chainsaw or the kids on bikes but I appreciate your take on the overreaction to both.
Absolutely agree with the take on Elise Stefanik who’s crying out for attention as well. The country will be very lucky if it’s not in a years long economic downturn, as a result of starting a trade war with the rest of the world, come next November. Next to the idea of bringing MAGA economics and justice to the whole of NY Kathy Hochul is going to look like FDR.
The best way to send Stefanik back to Albany is unemployed.
“Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” is a book from ? the ‘90’s which explains how men/women have different takes on the same situation. But I am bewildered by what seems like your defense of local aberrent behavior, Will.
That you would minimize the actual/potential threat to anyone trying to drive, surrounded by bikers on all sides who may or may not be also battering the car…or minimize the immediate concerns of anyone in any proximity to that MAGA -dressed maniac wielding a powered chainsaw is so unlike your deep-rooted concerns for the safety of humans and animals, the environment etc.
Women with young children in their vehicles, or older women driving alone, who are subjected to joy-riders intent on frightening them…or women with young kids or with toddlers in strollers who are participating in a downtown peace rally have every right to be alarmed and reactive to actual or perceived threats by young or older men. Violence against women is a pandemic all its own.
If other men jump on this platform topic in agreement with your stance today I am finished with The Front Page. Maybe Elon can give me a rocket ride to Venus.