A man punches another driver’s windshield because someone honked. The police follow him. The officer approaches calmly. Voice low. Hands visible. No drama.
Ten minutes of explanation.
Ten minutes of patience.
And again and again the same sentence:
“Why are you doing this to me?”
Not shouted in rage. Not framed as revolution. It sounds wounded. Confused. Personally wronged.
Why are you doing this to me?
In another video, different man, routine traffic stop. Suspended license. The officer explains. The driver interrupts, complains, spirals. The same refrain surfaces:
You’re ruining my day.
Why are you doing this to me?
It is a peculiar tone. Not criminal. Not ideological. Transactional.
The officer is not experienced as an agent of impersonal law. He is experienced as a hostile service provider.
The interaction feels less like enforcement and more like a customer dispute.
A citizen understands an uncomfortable fact:
There are rules.
I did not personally author them.
They apply anyway.
A customer understands something else:
If I dislike the experience, something is wrong with the provider.
When the customer model seeps into citizenship, friction becomes accusation.
A citation is no longer the result of a violation.
It is a failure of service.
An arrest is not consequence.
It is harassment.
In the customer model, inconvenience implies injustice. The system exists to facilitate the individual’s day. If it disrupts that day, it has betrayed its function.
“Why are you doing this to me?” makes perfect sense in a restaurant.
It makes no sense in front of a statute.
And yet the tone spreads.
You hear it in small public interactions. In bureaucratic offices. In classrooms. In the quiet shock that follows a firm no.
The emotional intensity is disproportionate to the event because the expectation underneath has shifted.
The citizen expects limits.
The customer expects accommodation.
The citizen asks, “What are the rules?”
The customer asks, “Why is this happening to me?”
The difference is not semantic. It is structural.
A society of citizens can tolerate inconvenience. It assumes friction as part of shared life.
A society of customers cannot. Every interruption feels personal. Every boundary feels like poor service.
The men in those videos are not monsters. They are signals. They seem genuinely astonished that the world does not rearrange itself around their mood.
The officer stands there, calm, procedural, almost bureaucratically gentle. He represents something older than the individual’s preference. Something that does not swipe, mute, or negotiate.
And that, perhaps, is the real tension.
We may still speak the language of rights and democracy. But somewhere beneath it, the posture has shifted.
The question is no longer, “What did I violate?”
It is, “Why are you doing this to me?”