On Saturday, July 23rd, Alison Ettel called police on a young girl selling water without a permit in Oakland, CA. The girl’s relative caught a video of Ettel, tweeted it out, and an Internet rage mob had identified her and her business within hours.
Twitter quickly dubbed the then-unidentified woman in the video #PermitPatty.
Permit Patty may be a racist, I don’t know.
She is indicative of a deeper and less-obvious problem in American society. This deeper problem comes from years of cultural and economic stagnation, decades of drilling a permission-based mindset into the lives of young Americans, and a slow decay of American civil society.
Permit Patty is a symptom of entrepreneurial decay. That we live in a world where it is at all normalized for a grown woman to call the police on a young business owner should give us pause to stop and think about how we got here.
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