Timely comment. I was biking home last night and hit the John Nolen Path around 9:15. As I appraoched Monona Terrace, a passenger in what would now be termed a "small" (!!) SUV started screaming at me at the top of his lungs (as the grassy area there provides something like a 30 yards buffer between the path and John Nolen Drive): "Fucking biker! (unintelligible) fatass bitch biker blah blah blah." How he made the gender identification to choose "bitch" rather than "bastard" in the dark is beyond me, perhaps he figured if I were a guy it would be a double insult. (It was clear he could not actually see my ass, as its skinniness has long been the object of good-hearted ribbing by my family.)
Anyway, I resisted the temptation to flip him off and instead carried a profound sense of sadness about his angry lot in life and had to wonder what is wrong with this country that a multitude of people feel threatened by the mere presence of bicycles. When I was in an actual war zone in a country many miles away working as an unarmed, pacifist peacekeeper and combatants became abusive, at least it was easy to understand why they saw me as a threat. I could transform that understanding into empathy and use that empathy to deescalate hostilities. But how do I understand folks like the John Nolen Drive screamer? I would write it off as his being a solitary loon, but this kind of behavior is not isolated. Anyway, I was also disappointed by the comment at the end of the Sprawl Study article that said the rash of driving in the U.S. is understandable because death rates for cyclists and ped are so much higher here than in Europe. Seems to me that the best way to avoid vehicular homicide is not to drive. If you ain't driving, you can't be killing anyone with your car. kathryn on 8/29/03 12:31 PM, Bike To Work Week at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > perhaps that's because the majority of motorists in Europe don't fantasize > about running down bicyclists with their obscenely large SUVs (oh wait, > most of them don't have obscenely large SUVs, either). > > > Chuck Strawser > Project Coordinator > Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin > 106 E. Doty Street, Suite 400 > P.O. Box 1224 > Madison, WI 53701-1224 > 608-251-4456 tel > 608-251-4594 fax > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > www.bfw.org > _______________________________________________ > Bikies mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://www.danenet.org/mailman/listinfo/bikies > _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.danenet.org/mailman/listinfo/bikies
