In the midst of the panic over Hurricane Rita, a little news item caught my interest: as the storm approached the coast of Texas, some defiant citizen went surfing.
Now, I will admit that this was probably not a particularly clever thing to do. It would have been far more clever of the man to hitch a ride on a school bus filled with old people and oxygen tanks and get the hell out of Texas altogether. But, hey, people drink and smoke and vote in favour of having the worst school system in the country, and there’s not too much you can do about it.
The police didn’t feel that way. They arrested him. And they handcuffed him and hauled him away.
Why?
That’s a good question. Did the police think he would cause billions of dollars of property damage? Or that he would be responsible for the deaths of innocent people? Or that he would make off with millions of dollars of illicit gains? That he would eat a French fry on a subway platform? No, that would have made him a tropical storm or a Republican.
I believe that the police arrested him because he refused to obey the most fundamental principle of the good order and peace: he wasn’t afraid.
It is not enough to obey the law. And it is not enough to leave people alone and mind your own business.
The act of surfing in the face of a tremendously fearsome storm headed your way is an act of defiance of a society that believes that order and civility can only be maintained if you and I are afraid of whatever it is the authorities deem to be fearsome, whether it is Arab terrorists, anthrax, taxes, or tropical storms. I believe the police intuitively understood that if this man’s attitude were to spread, the pillars of our exploitive, wasteful, consumerist society would begin to crumble and they, along with their establishment patrons, would all be in big trouble.
Reading too much into this? Maybe. But then, you explain to me why we are arresting people for eating French fries or surfing nowadays, and why the National Guard treated people fleeing Hurricane Katrina to the Superdome as potential criminals as they entered the building, and why the students at Columbine had to put their hands up as they evacuated the building long, long after the two killers had offed themselves?