If years had names, perhaps 2020 would be called “The Reckoning,” as the word was ubiquitous, used promiscuously to contend that people of privilege had to come to grips with the suffering endured by those without. It was a time to “settle accounts,” we were told, as guys were sent out to collect by breaking kneecaps or burning down random people’s businesses.

The cops needed a reckoning for their treatment of black and brown people. White people needed a reckoning for their privileged life, even if it wasn’t remotely privileged, on the backs of a pyramid of the oppressed, even if they weren’t remotely oppressed. All in all, there was a lot of damage done with very little to show for it.

One area where some progress was achieved was the election of local prosecutors who took office not to prosecute, unless the defendants were white women, wealthy or sex offenders (or any combination thereof), but to refuse to prosecute entire categories of crimes despite what legislatures had to say about it. The rationale was not that the conduct wasn’t criminal, or harmful, but that the people arrested for the crime tended to be predominately poor or of color. They would not, they either said aloud or implied by their stance, contribute further to the disproportionate caging of black people.

Of course, that gives rise to a sense of impunity, that one can do whatever one wants, whatever impulse no matter how violent or damaging strikes one’s fancy. And BMWs are considered pretty fancy, apparently.

The driver of the BMW was a 36-year-old man. His passenger was his mother. To the extent an explanation for the attack can be discerned, it was that he tried not to run over a bike in front of him.

“And I noticed this swarm of cyclists, tall, young kids just weaving in and out of traffic and kind of surrounding the car,” the driver said. “We got to the point where they were in front of me and they were on either side of me and behind me, and I’m probably going like seven or eight miles an hour.”

The driver, who only wanted to be identified as Max, said the kids were holding onto the door handles. He said his first instinct was to slow down, stop and let them pass him.

He said he didn’t see it, but a witness told him someone was behind the vehicle on a bike doing a wheelie. And when Max slowed down, the biker apparently crashed into the back of the car.

Hearing the crash, Max, whose race is unmentioned which is itself an oddity in a news story of this sort, stopped to do what any decent person would, find out if the person was okay. The other cyclists were not as concerned about the person who crashed.

“I started to open up the driver door but I was immediately surrounded on every side by these kids that have just gotten off their bikes and they started screaming, yelling, punching the car, hitting the hood of the car, just yelling, ‘get out, get out, open the roll down the window, roll down the window.’ When I didn’t, they started to take out their aggression on the car itself,” Max said.

What’s striking is that this happened in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue and 21st Street in Manhattan, right by the historic Flatiron Building. It happened in front of a city avenue full of witnesses. The cyclists weren’t at all concerned. They acted as if they were immune from challenge, from question, from consequences. They attacked with a sense of impunity.

Some would argue that this conduct, though not of the sort that young black and brown kids in their fantasies indulge, can be explained by generations of oppression, by reparations, by the “false equivalence” of violence to “black bodies” rather than damage to property. But can it be rationalized away?

“But it was only once they started smashing the windshields as soon as the windshield broke, and the glass hit our faces and landed in our laps and I realized, like the ceiling is collapsing,” Max said. “And if they jump on it one more time they’re going to gain access to the car. My mom is on the phone with 911 dispatcher who probably couldn’t understand a word she was saying, but literally the words I can’t get out of my mind were ‘they’re going to kill us, we are going to die…please send help.'”

Ironically, Max and his mom were on their way back from donating to a local charity when the attack occurred. The bikers didn’t know this, of course, but then, it’s not as if they asked. Or cared.

It may not be anyone’s fantasy that conduct like this happen, the excuses for it notwithstanding, but the natural consequence of removing responsibility from criminal conduct is to incentivize the conduct and, as reflected here, eliminate the taint and inhibition of indulging people’s worst and most violent impulses. What did Max do to deserve this? Had Max been so foolishly kind as to open his door or roll down his window, would he and his mother have been pulled into the street and beaten? Would that meet some chaos theory of reparations for harms done and endured by ghosts?

Holding the police responsible for their actions matters. Holding government responsible matters too. But the countervailing responsibility of people who are suddenly empowered by the well-intended mercy that lets them attack without any concern for either the harm they’re doing others or the consequences of their conduct must exist as well for a sustainable society.

I’ve never liked the word “reckoning.” It’s another in the long list of meaningless words to create the impression of change without focusing on anything of substance. But if the change wrought by progressive prosecutors gives rise to a sense of impunity to commit crimes, to damage property, to harm people, because of their status as the oppressed, I reckon it will not merely fail to serve any useful purpose, but will give rise to a huge backlash.

Max and his mom survived this attack, as did the prior victim of this “gang” of cyclists.

Police suspect the same group is responsible in an earlier incident where the group threw their bike at a yellow taxi in front of 261 Fifth Avenue.

In that case, the 52-year-old driver got out of his taxi and one of the suspects swung a bicycle at him, hitting him in the back.

If this is what is meant by a reckoning, then it’s time for the year of responsibility.