I don’t like to be fatalistic or defeatist, but there’s something broken in this country right now, on a basic social level. I don’t mean the big, systemic issues we already know about—racism, wealth inequality, the accelerating rise of fascism—but, specifically, what I perceive to be a general breakdown in people’s ability to exist in public.

You probably know what I’m talking about. We can all feel it, especially those of us who maybe spend too much time on social media. It’s certainly related to the big, systemic issues I mentioned above, but it also sits in its own little category in the venn diagram of life.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, a) you might be part of the problem, and b) let me offer some recent examples from my personal experience:

• People riding e-scooters on sidewalks, or racing down shared paths in e-motos, generally ignoring the fact that other people exist

• People watching videos at full volume (no headphones) on their personal devices on airplanes

• Youths having truly no idea how to behave in movie theaters, like none whatsoever, absolute mayhem

• This one guy at the gym, my enemy, who insists on doing circuits while the weight room is crowded, monopolizing easily a quarter of the equipment for half an hour and then wiping nothing down after he’s done

To be clear, I firmly believe that, by and large, people are good. Humanity is worth caring about and investing in. If you spend less time online and more time talking to your neighbors, volunteering at local events, and just generally touching grass, you see a lot more of the good than the bad. But there have always been exceptions to this rule (there has always been injustice, precarity, violence), and recently it seems like these minor but vexing exceptions have become more common.

You can blame the pandemic for part of this, I think. It messed young people up in a way we will probably be studying for decades. You can also blame social media, which has perhaps irreparably fractured our sense of shared reality while encouraging a pathological kind of self-absorbed, attention-seeking behavior.

But I think these are just accelerants to a woodpile that has been stacking up for much, much longer, some of the foundational logs of which include the following:

1. Public spaces have been under attack since the onset of capitalism. Ever since the enclosures (the only real tragedy of the commons is that they were taken from us), the rich and powerful have looked for ways to seize and privatize spaces for profit. Why let people cooperatively farm on shared land when you could make them pay rent instead? Public spaces are especially endangered here in the U.S., where almost every square foot of space and every second of our time has been snatched up by capitalism (just try hanging out somewhere outside of your home where you don’t have to spend money) and where…

2. We are further confined to private space by our suburban and car-dependent infrastructure. I’ve written about this previously (ad nauseam?), but a car is like a little house that you get to take with you wherever you go. It is private transportation, which many Americans use to convey themselves from their private domiciles to their private workplaces and back again. It is possible to spend several days in America without being in public at all, so it’s no wonder many of us seem to be out of practice. A little social ineptitude is annoying, yes, but it can also be dangerous, because…

3. American culture values your right to swing your fist above my right to an unbruised face. The fist, of course, is a metaphor. It’s about all the ways our culture and policies place the “personal freedoms” of accumulating or protecting capital ahead of the personal freedoms of safety, sovereignty, and dignity. It’s about billionaires, data centers, the NRA, McKinseyism, private equity, Kyle Rittenhouse, Airbnb, and… yeah, okay, I’ll say it. It’s about cars.

This newsletter was so close to not being about cars. I really thought I’d managed to find something else to complain about, that I could give my readers a moment’s peace. But then the New York Times published an investigation into the deadly impact of increasing vehicle sizes in the U.S. and I couldn’t let it go. These cars are killing people—especially kids! In their own driveways! But to suggest that we perhaps set some rules about hood heights would be to infringe on your red-blooded, god-given American liberties to be the biggest and baddest on the block.

Of course, vehicle size is just one of many reasons why U.S. motorists kill more pedestrians now than they did in 1980, why they’re killing people at almost double the rate of European motorists. Our traffic design has something to do with it, as does our transportation infrastructure generally (see point 2). But also, I think a lot of it is simply your de facto right to swinging your fist not ending where my face begins.

There is currently a petition for the Denver to install speed tables along a high-speed corridor in my corner of the city—which, by the way, was a recommendation from the city’s own safety study. As of writing, more than 500 people have signed on. Here’s a selection of some of the comments they have left:

• “I have young kids and I don’t want them to be crushed to death by somebody in an Escalade”

• “I don't want my daughter to be killed.”

• “Human lives are more important than saving a few minutes on your commute.”

• “I want my son to grow up in a city that isn’t trying to kill him.”

• “Cities are for people, and people should feel safe.”

There are hundreds more like this. These are the complaints of people who understand that a pedestrian’s right to be safe, that sometimes even their right to life, is secondary to a motorist’s right to swing their big metal fist as fast as they want.

I will now shut up about cars, but if you live in Denver, particularly along the East Colfax corridor, please add your name to the petition!

Lately, my husband and I have been carping about the golden rule a lot more than it feels like we should have to. “How,” he moans when yet another SUV uses the bike lane as their personal parking spot, or when we read yet another news story that features Elon Musk, “did so many people forget about the golden rule? Just treat people the way you want to be treated! It’s not that hard!”

But honestly, I don’t think people forgot. I think they only learned to apply the lesson to private life, and not to extend it to public life.

If I talked one-on-one to all but the most reprehensible of people, I’m sure I would find them to be tolerable, polite, maybe even pleasant. I’m sure the teens who buzz past me on their loud (illegal) e-motos say please and thank-you at the dinner table, or that the men in unnecessarily lifted trucks are sweet to their children, or that, I don’t know, J.D. Vance gives very thoughtful Christmas gifts. And I’m sure they would all, when asked, insist that they value the golden rule and abide by it to the best of their ability.

But there’s a difference between how we comport ourselves when we’re in close contact with people whose personhood is literally staring us in the face and how we behave in public, where we enjoy relative anonymity and where the social consequences of poor behavior are not felt immediately, if they are at all. You would never swing your fist right at my face inside my home, but if you’re swinging your fist out in public and my face happens to be nearby? That sounds like a me problem.

We know to treat others the way we want to be treated; the corollary that many people seem to miss is that we should also behave in public the way we want everyone else to behave.

To illustrate, I invite you to imagine a world in which everybody, not just a few assholes, regularly engages in the following:

• Driving recklessly (or cycling, or scootering)*

• Standing right up against the baggage carousel at the airport

• Talking in movie theaters

• Never picking up dog waste

• Interacting with neighbors only through the lens of a surveillance doorbell cam, inherently mistrusting everyone who ever triggers its motion sensor

Are you imagining? Is it hell? Do your palms itch just thinking about the Mad Max–ass world we’ve just envisioned together?

Now take a deep breath and imagine nobody doing any of this … Instant relief. Serenity. Peace on Earth and goodwill to all mankind.

People act in antisocial ways because they enjoy swinging their fists, because they do not particularly care where anyone else’s face begins, and perhaps because they feel that doing so will protect their own faces from the swinging fists of other people. Rather than behaving the way they want everyone else to behave, or treating the public the way they wish to be treated, they’re doing unto others before it can be done unto them.

On the eve of the Fourth of July, when we celebrate “American independence” just two weeks after a holiday that commemorates the end of American slavery, I can’t help but think that nothing is more American than this. Swinging our fists and calling it freedom. Maintaining a wide enough radius around ourselves that we don’t have to face the conditions just beyond the reach of those fists. Doing anything with our hands except embracing our neighbors and building something better with them.

I happen to be a big fan of public spaces. Existing in public—walking, talking, idling, organizing—is a privilege of free and safe societies, one that was extended to women rather more recently than men. It is a privilege that is actually essential to this newsletter: While most of the flowers I share here grow on people’s private property, I get to enjoy them from the shared, public space of the sidewalk.

The public can and should be a nice place to be, but it requires the active, constructive participation of everyone who shares in it. I can’t keep you from swinging your fist—I will move my face out of the way sooner than letting you bruise me and taking you to court for it. But I can be a good member of the public for my own part. Perhaps if I’m feeling brave I can tell you off for careless fist-swinging, see if shame will make any difference. And I can teach my kid to be careful with his own fists, to value the faces of others as much as he values his own. And maybe some day the fist-swingers will stop what they’re doing for just long enough to look around and realize that being part of the public is actually nicer than being always in conflict with it.

* One does not have to stretch the imagination very far for this example if one lives in Denver, which is already, transportationally speaking, hell.