You are sixteen years old. You want to feel the wind. The world is expensive. The streets are paved for heavy cars. The machines sold in dealerships cost more than a used sedan. So you find a lightweight electric bike. You twist the throttle and you feel alive. This is not a crime wave. It is a cry for joy. We who grew up with the open road forget what it means to be locked in a room, staring at a screen, waiting for life to begin.

But joy on a fifty-mile-an-hour machine does not belong on a pedestrian sidewalk. When you ride too fast past a stroller, when you ignore the stop sign, when you cut through a neighborhood without looking, you are not expressing freedom. You are risking a neighbor’s life. The prophets do not bless the reckless. Amos names those who trample the needy; he calls for the just use of power. A dirt bike on pavement is a blunt instrument, and using it in a crowded street is cruelty to the vulnerable person walking there. We saw this tragedy in California, where a fourteen-year-old on an e-moto struck and killed a man, and prosecutors charged the boy’s mother with involuntary manslaughter. That death is not a reason to rejoice in the rider’s ruin, but a shared grief born from the same lack of dignified space. The prophets bless neither the unguided child nor the unprotected pedestrian.

Yet the answer to reckless riding is not a bulldozer. The sight of authorities crushing two hundred seized machines into scrap metal is not public safety. It is a theater of contempt. Dorothy Day built her work on the conviction that the human person is the center of all social life. When the state answers a social symptom with the destruction of property, it treats citizens as disposable problems to be flattened rather than persons to be guided. And this contempt wears more than one face. In Illinois, lawmakers drafted a registration law requiring a manufacturer’s certificate of origin that most e-motos simply do not carry. The bikes cannot be titled. They cannot be insured. They are legally orphaned. That bureaucratic catch-22 is the quiet cousin of the bulldozer: contempt without the noise, exclusion by paperwork rather than by steel. A machine can be crushed, a license can be denied, but the hunger for motion and belonging remains. The state clears the ground, but it does not teach the rider how to live.

What is happening on American roads right now is a moral phenomenon before it is a regulatory one. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that e-motos — cheap, fast, electric dirt bikes manufactured almost entirely for off-road use and sold direct-to-driveway through e-commerce platforms — have become the hottest category in American motorcycling. One model, the Surron Light Bee, moved roughly sixteen thousand units last year, a figure that by itself would outsell Harley-Davidson’s entire line of sport and adventure bikes. The industry, facing an eight-percent sales decline and a median owner age hovering near fifty, is watching this phenomenon with the desperate hope of a legacy institution that has forgotten how to speak to the young. It is also watching it with the dread of an institution that remembers what happened the last time unregulated dirt bikes flooded American streets — in the 1970s, when a regulatory backlash choked off the youth pipeline for decades. Christy LaCurelle, president of the Motorcycle Industry Council, put the parallel plainly: “Nobody in the industry back then was able to capitalize on all of those young riders that were out there and try to get them to come along. And here we are again.”

There is a kind of freedom that is not freedom at all. Liberty untethered from the common good is just chaos with better branding. When a culture refuses to do the harder, earlier work of formation and waits until crisis forces its hand, the bluntness of the bulldozer is not a failure of justice — it is the predictable whiplash of a society that outsourced moral formation to the market and is now discovering that the market declined the assignment. Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, who pushed through licensing and insurance requirements after he and his daughters were nearly struck on a sidewalk, captured the dynamic with more theological precision than he probably intended: “Innovation without guard rails puts people at risk.” That is not regulatory timidity. That is the voice of a public official who has stumbled onto a principle the Church names as the universal destination of goods — the insistence that no freedom, economic or technological, is morally neutral when it endangers the vulnerable. And the vulnerable are everywhere in this story: the man killed in California; the pedestrians forced off sidewalks; the children being inducted into a culture that cannot decide whether it is a sport, a transportation mode, or a rolling contempt for the social contract.

The industry’s posture toward e-motos is not stewardship; it is hunger. Honda’s first full-year loss — driven by EV plans slamming into a shifting policy landscape — and the May surge in hybrid sales as pure EVs sputter both tell the same story from different angles: people want practical freedom, not ideological purity. But the motorcycle industry, watching e-motos as a demographic lifeline, draws exactly the wrong lesson. A movement built on regulatory evasion and public endangerment is a foundation of sand. The industry’s own unofficial evangelist has already said the quiet part aloud. The YouTuber known as Sur Ronster, filming a Los Angeles group ride where fellow riders mounted sidewalks and veered into oncoming traffic, admitted into the camera: “That’s just the self-fulfilling prophecy of this entire community, which is inherently illegal. By participating in the activity, you’re hurting the future of the activity.” That is not marketing copy. That is an examination of conscience conducted in real time.

The Catholic social tradition has a name for what Sur Ronster described without knowing it: structural sin — the way individual choices aggregate into systems that make virtue harder and vice easier, that normalize recklessness and punish restraint, that turn participation into complicity. The e-moto culture, as it currently operates on American streets, is structurally sinful. Not because the bikes are evil — they are machines, morally inert — but because the system in which they circulate has been optimized for speed, access, and volume while systematically stripping away every mechanism of accountability: no license requirement at point of sale, no dealer gatekeeping, no road-safety equipment, no rider education, no enforcement capacity that can keep pace with e-commerce delivery trucks.

The climate that produces this crisis is one our own communities helped to build. We designed our cities for automobiles and priced the young out of legitimate recreation. We built miles of highways without a single place for a boy to safely twist a throttle. We sold the older generation expensive touring bikes and left the younger generation to figure it out in the gray margin. Just as Honolulu’s shared bicycle fleet shrank under the weight of its own decay, the shared street shrinks when neither the rider nor the regulator knows how to care for it. You who ride must learn that your neighbor’s safety is your boundary. You who regulate must learn that enforcement without dignity produces only resentment. The door of return stays open when we refuse to treat either group as enemies.

The path forward requires the hard work of making space. Catholic Social Teaching has long held that the state must order common life so that people can flourish. That means zoning easements for municipally owned motocross parks in underserved wards, where engines can scream without shattering windows. It means state-subsidized conversion-kit vouchers for families below a set income, bringing mirrors, signals, and street-approved tires within reach of working hands. It means mandatory school-based safety curricula before a young rider can register a bike, teaching speed limits to a new generation rather than waiting until a child is killed to apply the brakes. Pope Francis warns against a globalized indifference that says the suffering of others does not concern us. The sidewalk rider and the police commander are both in the same boat. To ignore the need is to drown in it.

Jesus said of the young crying out in the streets: we played flute for you, and you did not dance. The elders demanded silence while the young demanded motion. The answer is not to smash the instruments. The answer is to build a street where the flute and the dance can coexist without destroying the neighborhood.