Just wanted to comment on the latest Critical Mass ride down John Nolen Friday night, because sometimes hearing the account of a victim can help prevent recidivism. It is known to work for rapists, maybe it can work for the self-righteous too.
I've ridden in CM myself more than once before, blocked traffic to protest the invasion of Afghanistan, and done direct action for many other activist causes, but from the perspective of being a victim of a Critical Mass ride, it looked profoundly insipid. First of all, the ride was down John Nolen, along which courses one of the most pleasant bike paths in the known universe, along a lake with a stunning view of downtown Madison. So the action missed the most basic point: form should follow function. Every driver in every car must have been thinking the same thing. If you must, protest on a road where bikes don't have another option. As I say, I'm very inclined to be sympathetic to activism, but I can report a personal reaction of intense impatience as I was made later and later for my meeting with friends who could easily leave were I not to show up on time. I can't imagine what it would have been like were I on my way to a first date! Then of course on John Nolen there are no escape options, and it's on the way to the hospital, so the CM riders were also threatening peoples' lives. It reminded me of the first famous action of the equally insipid Earth First! group, which was to unroll a huge strip of plastic down a dam to make it look like it was bursting, terrorizing the local people and turning them into enemies of environmentalism. Brilliant. When I arrived to meet my friends who are also bikies, they could only snigger at my inconvenience and how my evening had been ruined. When I brought up the issue of Peak Oil and how a lifetime of conservation would have slowed it down by what, a third of a second, they got mad and started threatening to leave. They said they couldn't care less about how the drivers felt. Isn't indifference the enemy?? Look people, we have to start thinking about the future, and picking our targets. Ordinary people trying to get home or to meet friends after long grueling work weeks are not the enemy. They're just sheep smugly hegemonized, and sheep only because they have been cowed into submission by a society based on insane unsustainable rules. Car makers are the enemy, road builders, lobbyists, corrupt politicians, PR firms, right wing talk show hosts, and ultimately the deluded consciousness certain of our right not to care driving all those forces. Yes bicycles are part of the solution, and yes the indifference of drivers and policy makers to needs and safety of bicycles can constitute criminal negligence, but just randomly picking a bunch of people and messing with their lives is in the exact same spirit as flying airplanes into buildings because you disapprove of a way of life the victims might not even share. Very soon, maybe in weeks or months, we are going to feel the first direct bites of Peak Oil, and meanwhile nothing about that will spare us the equally extreme catastrophe of runaway climate change. The mess in Burma, the Iraq War, the coming war with Iran, are just preludes. We need to start learning the lessons from Cuba after they lost the support of the Soviet Union in 1990, how they transitioned to a sustainable bicycle-centric, communal society. We need to clear the decks of howling free-trade idiots and wake up to the real task here, which is to make it through the next 100 years with some vestige of our civilization intact. Speaking as a victim, I am absolutely certain blocking traffic on Friday night is not the way. Alex _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [email protected] http://www.danenet.org/mailman/listinfo/bikies
