Counterpoint: Scooter Takeover Was Reckless, Not Restorative

Teenagers need freedom and adventure. They do not need adults celebrating dangerous, unlawful behavior.

I am generally reluctant to get worked up over teenagers doing dumb things. Teenagers are supposed to test limits, annoy adults, make questionable decisions and accumulate a few stories they will someday tell with embarrassment.

But Noor Adwan’s defense of the Minneapolis scooter takeover tests the limits of that generosity.

This was not a few kids riding scooters too fast through a park. Hundreds of riders filled downtown streets, blocked traffic, rode the wrong way, occupied intersections and, in some cases, entered Interstate 35W. The Minnesota Star Tribune’s own reporting said the crowds snarled traffic and that Minneapolis police described their movements as “reckless and disruptive to traffic.” Lime said many participants broke its rules and announced that riders identified as having entered the highway would be banned.

Other local news reports showed hundreds of scooters and bikes blocking traffic at times. The Minnesota State Patrol confirmed that scooters are prohibited on freeways and warned that entering one could result in a serious or fatal crash involving riders and motorists alike.

That is the behavior Adwan waves away as “kids being kids and having fun.”

Really?

There is an enormous difference between teenage mischief and commandeering public streets while expecting everyone else to accommodate you. Having fun does not give anyone a special claim on the road, and being spontaneous does not make traffic laws optional. Nor does youth somehow make a driver traveling at freeway speed better able to avoid a scooter rider who should never have been there.

Adwan acknowledges that the takeover was “risky and obnoxious,” then astonishingly concludes: “But this is the exact kind of stuff teenagers should be doing.”

No. It is not.

Teenagers should socialize, get outside, be adventurous and occasionally push boundaries. That is part of growing up. But deliberately disrupting other people’s lives and creating hazards on public roadways is not a healthy form of self-expression simply because the people doing it are young.

And notice the convenient framing of this entire episode as teenage rebellion. News reports indicated that participants spanned a range of ages, and the organizer interviewed by CBS News was 20. Calling the entire event “kids being kids” infantilizes participants precisely when infantilizing them makes their conduct easier to excuse.

Then comes the condescension. Adwan tells those disturbed by the videos not to “clutch your pearls” and asks whether our own favorite teenage memories involved things our parents approved of.

That is not an argument. It is a dodge.

Of course most adults did stupid things when they were young. I certainly did. But here is the part apparently missing from this romantic recollection of adolescence: We were still wrong when we were wrong.

Being young explained some of our behavior. It did not turn bad judgment into good judgment. In many cases, consequences were exactly how we learned where the boundaries were.

Nor does the fact that “no arrests were made” settle anything. It means exactly what it says: no arrests were made. It does not establish that no laws were broken, nobody was endangered or the conduct deserves applause. Minneapolis scooter rules require riders to obey traffic laws, and the State Patrol separately confirmed that scooters are prohibited on freeways.

We should also retire the implication that because nobody was reported seriously injured, the behavior must have been essentially harmless. MPR News reported videos showing riders falling even though no serious crashes or injuries were officially reported. KARE reported that 11 State Patrol squads were dispatched after reports of hundreds of riders entering the interstate.

Sometimes a dangerous stunt ends without catastrophe. That does not make the stunt sensible. It means everyone involved was fortunate.

Adwan also writes that, were she a parent — which she acknowledges she is not — she would prefer her teenager be out being “silly and spontaneous” rather than sitting home playing video games.

That presents a ridiculous false choice.

Are those really our options now? Isolation in a bedroom or mass disruption of city streets? Surely young people are capable of friendship, adventure, independence and fun without requiring hundreds of strangers to surrender the ordinary use of public roads.

And this is where the column touches a larger problem.

We increasingly seem unable to distinguish empathy from absolution. We talk about freedom while ignoring the obligations that make shared freedom possible, and we sometimes mistake tolerance for a requirement that everyone else simply put up with whatever happens.

Someone causes a disruption and, instead of first asking what obligations that person owed the people around them, we immediately search for a therapeutic explanation.

They were bored. They needed community. They were expressing themselves. They were having fun.

Fine.

None of those explanations grants temporary ownership of the city.

Public spaces work because the people using them accept reciprocal obligations. I get to use the street, and so do you. I get to enjoy downtown, and so do you. The fact that one group arrives in larger numbers does not make everyone else an inconvenience to be pushed aside.

That principle should be especially obvious to someone serving as Opinion audience editor and a member of the Minnesota Star Tribune Editorial Board. How does someone holding that position at a major daily newspaper end up publishing not merely an explanation of reckless, disruptive and, in some instances, unlawful behavior, but an endorsement of it?

How did “this is the exact kind of stuff teenagers should be doing” strike anyone exercising editorial judgment as a responsible lesson to offer young readers?

Kids do need more community. They need independence and adventure too.

What they also need are adults willing to say a simple word when circumstances require it:

No.

That was dangerous. That disrupted other people. You do not get to do that.

Learning that lesson is not the opposite of growing up.

It is what growing up means.