Notes from my Knapsack 3-4-21

Notes from my Knapsack 3-4-21

Jeff Gill

Consensus, coercion, & community

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Even when we don't all agree on much, our consensus as a community is clear every time you stop at a stop sign.

That red octagonal warning is an instruction, a reminder. It also can be seen as an expression of the law, and we're used to thinking of "the law" as an objective reality, but it's really much more of our community consensus that at certain places, you should stop, and we concur by so doing. We stop.

Okay, sometimes, we roll. Tapping the brakes and slowing, looking back and forth, and not quite stopping. Am I saying too much? Is this just me? No? Didn't think so. Late at night, in a quiet neighborhood, when… well, when no one is looking. And we think, when it doesn't matter much.

Circumstances alter cases. The central intersection in Our Fayre Village, Broadway and Main, has a stop light, and no one would breeze through it, even at midnight… I think. But the stop instruction encoded in the red-yellow-green is enhanced with a "no right turn on red" instruction which means you can't do so before 7:30 pm. But I've been behind more than a few who did so, and I've been in the right turn lane there at 5:15 pm and been honked at while the light is red.

You see what I mean? We have laws, and reminders of said laws, but our community is governed primarily by consensus. If the consensus breaks down, we lose much of the reliable substructure of law and ordinance and policy, even if the written law and technical enforcement remains unchanged.

I'm sure both time of day and distance from the center of town, as well as the amount of traffic nearby all weigh heavily on compliance, because once violated, a law about stop signs is less than the paper it's written on (I'm staying away from the traffic camera debate here entirely). Zoning and building, though, take us into a different category, one I work with regularly with our community board for that. If you are given a variance to build within eight feet of your lot line, and you actually put in your porch or patio to two feet away, it's concrete (sometimes literally!) and visible long after the act. But if you don't make a big deal out of it, and your neighbors don't mind, we might not catch it, especially if it's small. The problem is if a while later a new neighbor moves in, and does care, and the evidence of your breach of consensus is still sitting there, a violation.

So we've got two basic categories here: the passing event or behavior, and the permanent impact in physical or fiscal terms. And in each, you have the big violations, and the small. Small breaches of the social consensus in terms of impermanent acts are those most likely to slide by.

Which brings us to masks, and the policies around them. Did you have a mask on yesterday indoors with strangers, and who's to know? Most of these are like rolling through a stop sign at midnight. But if you say "the consensus is silly" and make a general habit of not sharing in it, day after day, it starts to become a concrete and un-ignorable fact.

How do we build a consensus around behavior, to support personal acts in public spaces?

(To be continued)

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's gotten a few speeding tickets in strict enforcement zones. Tell him what kind of consensus you're hoping we can reach as a community at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.