Gone in 60 Seconds
or, “Bike Theft & Total Depravity”
101 days ago I bought a brand new Jamis Coda Sport.
I no longer own a Jamis Coda Sport.
I recently moved to Washington, D.C. and my workplace is across the Potomac River, in Alexandria, VA. While scouting out the area, I was pleasantly surprised to find biking from Capitol Hill to Old Town was not only do-able, but enjoyable! The D.C. area is consistently ranked in the top 10 US cities for biking (and commuting by bike), fitting in with eco-friendly hubs like Portland, OR and Boulder, CO. I spent a significant part of my childhood living in Cambridge, England, where culturally the bicycle is the primary form of in-town transport, so the idea of biking to work appealed to me.
And when you really start crunching numbers, which is something I like to do, it makes even more sense. Taking the metro from Union Station on the red line to Chinatown / Gallery Place in order to transfer to the yellow line towards Huntington to end up at Braddock Road costs $3.55 one way, and takes 45 minutes. On a good day. Most of the time you won’t find the trains running on schedule (case in point). Add in the 2.5 miles of walking to and from the metro stations, and it clocks in at over an hour. If I buy a bike, I shave off 20-30 minutes of travel time, save $7 per day and add 17.4 miles of cardio to my fitness log.
The route is beautiful — the US Capitol, Washington Monument, the National Mall, the Jefferson Memorial, and the Tidal Basin all feature prominently before you cross the Potomac. The second half of the ride winds alongside the George Washington Memorial Parkway, skirting Washington National airport and the marina as you leave the hustle of the nearby urban centers. My favorite part of each commute is stopping to watch (and feel and hear) the airplanes roar overhead as they land and take off from the runway from DCA. Part of the bike path runs through Gravelly Point Park, right at the edge of the runway. It feels like, if you stretch just a little, you can touch the planes as they land!
Clearly, it made sense to ride a bike to work. So I did. I bought a brand new Jamis Coda Sport from the great guys at Wheel Nuts Bike Shop in Alexandria and I started to use it daily.
Last Friday I got home from work just before 6 o’clock in the evening, a little earlier than usual, but it was already fairly dark. I walked my bike up some stairs, through the front gate to our house, up another set of stairs to the front door. My roommate saw me coming and went to unlock the doors to let me in. I was going to drop off my bag and immediately head to the grocery store, so I didn’t bring my bike inside like I usually do. I was in the house for about 60 seconds. In that amount of time, I paid one of the subtler costs of living in D.C. — the bike theft tax.
Before moving on to the moral of this story, let me clear the air. I know to lock my bike, always. I know to never leave it outside or unattended, ever. I know bike theft in D.C. is common, and I know my area of town has a fairly decent crime rate (despite being within sight of the legislative center of the United States). I know, I know, I know.
In college, for one of my Electrical Engineering classes, I worked with a team to develop a device which allowed students to use their student IDs to reserve rooms in the Commons building for events, communal TV watching, and the like. One of the design issues we faced was the device allowed students to override previous entries into the system, either inadvertantly or intentionally. From an engineering standpoint, it clearly needed to be addressed, but in an informal meeting I challenged some assumptions behind the need to fix this issue. Perhaps simply to play devil’s advocate, I argued no student who wished to reserve a room to watch the newest episode of “the Office” would maliciously steal someone’s reservation. It seemed preposterous to me. It held little reward (definitely not worth lying to the residence staff in an attempt to claim primacy) and the scheme itself was unlikely to work more than once. Besides, most of the students at my school are pretty good people, right? Why lie about something so stupid?
This anecdote shares a core principle with the incident of the stolen bike, and sheds light on a troublesome perception. Knowing my bike was all-but unrecoverable, I shared my immediate reaction on Facebook:
Depravity is a heavy word. It literally means “moral corruptness” or “wickedness”. The early Christian theologian Augustine spoke of “Total Depravity” as being born in a corrupt state, wickedness infects every inch of us, bone and marrow. So here I face a conflict with the two scenarios I have shared. Assuming stealing someone else’s bike, or intentionally taking someone’s room reservation, is wrong, and if I believe every man and woman is naturally depraved, shouldn’t be surprised. It is to be expected humans will do things that are wrong.
I really do believe humans are “corrupt”, if only from examining my own experience. This entire reflection stems from one question: “if I claim to believe man is corrupt, and therefore will do wrong things, why am I surprised it would only take a minute for someone to steal my bike?” I was rife with incredulity, because in my mind there are distinctions. If I leave my bike unlocked in a public place overnight I wouldn’t be surprised if it disappeared. But this was at my house, right at my front door. I claim to believe total depravity, but I am afraid I append a caveat to it—something to the tune of “as long as I avoid tempting potential thieves, their corrupt instincts will remain suppressed.” But the individual who stole my bike stole it without a second thought. There was no second-guessing, no weighing of right or wrong, no thorough examination of the morality of the actions. The theft of the bike damages the idea that, on the aggragate, we’re all “basically good”.
My conclusion is straightforward: we live in a culture that ultimately refuses to admit innate corruption. English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge put it this way: “The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.” One stolen bike is quite honestly a small incident, but it brought to light a larger lesson — believing most people are inherently “good” is an incredibly dangerous, deceptive belief. And not intentionally defining what you believe about this on a regular basis will leave you confused when life happens to you.
I am very grateful it was just a stolen bike — the value of which is relatively inconsequential. It is grace that small happenings like this bring to light heavier things. My frustration was fairly normal for the situation, but as I think back on it, I see the areas where I ought to shift my thinking to reflect my belief that we are indeed “children of wrath”. Over the arc of our lives, thinking any of us will choose to be good or even decide not to be bad if given the choice is simply untrue. In search of truth, I firmly believe one has to start by asking the right questions. And in this instance, the right question is not “will I choose to do good”, but instead “I know I am not innately good; what will fix that?”
If it takes a million stolen bikes to get us to ask that question, well, I’ll gladly leave my bike unlocked from now on.
