The Bicycle Thief

The Netherlands (population 16 million) has more bicycles than people. Every year, over one tenth of these bikes are stolen. It’s getting so bad that the Amsterdam police have recently decided to start using GPS systems to track stolen bicycles. Apparently, the biggest problem is the proliferation of gangs of professional bicycle thieves, who roam the city at night with trucks and load up dozens of pilfered bikes at a time. Except for the whole free love/drug use thing, our Cantabrigian community might be Amsterdam’s kid sibling: Cambridge is the bike theft capital of Massachusetts, and the greater Boston area ranks sixth nationally among the worst cities for bicycle larceny. So I guess I had it coming.

Yep, somebody stole my bicycle. I’m guessing it happened during the wee hours on Monday, because when I got up at 6:30 a.m. for early morning crew practice, I found my two water bottles discarded on the spot where my purple Raleigh (yes, purple) had been resting against a pylon under the Leverett library. I looked around in vague disbelief for a minute or two, and then I grumbled and trudged my way to the boathouse. My one consolation was that unless my bicycle thief was M.C. Hammer, his outfit would never match his ride.

The entire affair has been something of a minor tragedy in my otherwise ingenuous existence. It wasn’t so much the bike’s loss that I lamented—it can easily be replaced with another, less outrageously colored, model. What really bothered me was that someone had jolted me out of my comfortable world with what can only be described as an act of patent, petty meanness. I sure hope that there were bona fide economic motives behind the theft (and I really hope the bandit is using the cash from my bike to pay his landlord, not his dealer). But from my point of view, it felt like a bully had just pushed me into the dirt, stamped on my favorite sweater and taken my fruit rollup.

I felt like calling out, “Hey Mister Robber Dude, did it ever occur to you that maybe I needed my naiveté? Well, uh, I did!” Look: bad things happen to good people, right? Ever since God placed bets on Job, we’ve all accepted that. Or at least we do on an intellectual level. But to survive in the real world from day to day, we also have to suppress our cynicism. In every adult, one of the most tenacious stowaways from childhood is a fierce belief that life should be fair, people should be honest and justice should prevail. That’s why we cheer for the good guys and shake our fists at people who try to cheat the system.

As cynical as we have become, we depend on this naiveté for survival. That’s because cynicism is paralyzing. If you really believed that your car was going to get stolen no matter how loud a security system you installed, you’d never park it anywhere. Same thing with bikes: If you lived in constant fear of theft, you’d never ride it anywhere, and certainly not in Cambridge. And let’s not forget politics. After Watergate, Vietnam, Iran-Contra, Clinton-Lewinsky and dozens of other episodes of the now-syndicated television show called “The Political Letdown,” why would anyone ever put faith in a politician? Because we have no other choice, we have to believe that the system works, if only for our own peace of mind.

But the reality is that the system doesn’t work. And our dirty little secret is that we’re all cheaters, in our own ways. We expect that laws will be enforced rigorously, and we demand the strictest punishment when others are caught being dishonest. But as individuals we’re always trying to slip through the cracks. We demand that the system be fair, as long as we ourselves can cheat. Like me: I insist on enforcing the strict interhouse rules that keep Leverett’s dining hall somewhat less crowded, and yet I complain with the best of them when I can’t get into Adams for lunch.

Most of us are just small-scale cheaters: We speed on the highway; we make minor omissions on our tax forms; we sneak in through the back door at Adams. We’ve become accustomed to these minor infractions. But the Big Rules almost everyone obeys. Let’s face it—even murderers stop at red lights. So it’s really a shock to the system when the basic fairness of the world is exposed for what it is—frankly, a big sham. Thou shalt not swindle thy shareholders out of their life savings, thou shalt not deceive the public about a major war, thou shalt not steal thy neighbor’s bicycle. When these commandments are broken, the real tragedy is to watch as the carefully painted drop cloths of Justice fall lifeless to the stage floor, unsupported by the strings of illusion. And in these moments, dealing with the loss of our faith in a just world is a far harder pill to swallow than any loss of property, purple or otherwise.

Christopher W. Snyder ’04 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.