Does hostility in American society originate in driving, or does aggression on the road originate in the essential competitiveness and hostility of American society?
Whether I'm in my car or on my bicycle, any journey on the public right of way involves a running critique of the road users around me. It is usually profane. Sealed in my car, I know the other parties can't hear me, nor do I want them to. On my bike, I mostly mutter to myself, while the targets of my ire speed past, sealed in their sensory deprivation tanks. I wonder all the while what they must be saying about me. No hard feelings. It's just how we are.
When I first heard about the damning video of Alex Pretti behaving less than angelically in an encounter with federal goons days before his street execution by the same or similar goons, I thought that cursing and kicking taillights is such an angry cyclist thing to do. Pretti was an avid rider, well known and liked in the bike scene.
Nearly every road rider has had an incident in which we fought back against motorist aggression in a running skirmish. One guy I met used a penny-farthing as his daily ride, so his favorite move was to ride up to an antagonist stuck in traffic and kick the side mirror off the vehicle. I smashed a frame pump over the trunk lid of a punk kid's car after two of his passengers clammed on me after ordering me off the road. These are things that riders generally do in young adulthood, the prime years for heroics in wars both official and unofficial. But I've known riders as old as 60 who would pop off, yell obscenities, and wave vulgar gestures at offending motorists. As a cyclist, however, he was "young." He had only taken up serious road riding a couple of years earlier. And he was exceptionally spirited. A few years later he got bored with it all, sold his whole fleet, and we haven't seen him since, but he ran hot and hard while he ran at all.
As cyclists, we develop underdog spirit that drives us to keep pedaling in the face of the motorist majority. For most of us it leads to some shouting, some gestures, maybe a fistfight or two. But some riders get more serious about the disparity in deadly potential between massive vehicles that weigh up to several tons, and squishy little humans on conveyances that weigh somewhere between 19 and 30 pounds on average. They actually pack heat.
I vaguely recall an incident a number of years ago, within this century and possibly within this decade, in which a cyclist caught up to a motorist that had wronged him, and shot the driver, before pedaling away. Bad show, but an understandable temptation. That very temptation is a great reason not to pack heat.
A rider I knew in the mid 1980s carried a .380 in his jersey pocket. I always worried that he might decide to use it. In my own consideration of whether to be that seriously armed, I think about when it would be appropriate. Best I can figure, you only know it's justified at the moment that it becomes too late to use it effectively. Most motorists who are going to kill you with their car will do it from behind, because they are cowards and bullies as well as homicidal psychopaths. Even with a mirror or a rear-facing camera, how can you be sure that the vehicle setting up to brush you isn't just trying to throw a high inside pitch, rather than eliminate you entirely?
I've had guns shown to me by motorists while we were both still moving. None of them ever got around to actually pointing it at me. In the one or two incidents that led to conversations on the side of the road, no weapons were used at all. If it escalated beyond words at all, it was just good old traditional playground bully shoving, punching, and wrestling. A gun would not have made my point any better than the foolish fisticuffs did.
Pretti's armament was supposedly visible in his earlier incident, which did not lead to deadly force or charges filed against him, so it seems like carrying was a habit. I haven't seen anything about whether he would do it on rides. But carrying a gun is like buying a lottery ticket. You don't want this to be the day you didn't do either one, in case your number comes up.
When his number did come up, he deemed that it was not an appropriate time to respond in that way. That is so often the answer when it comes to deadly force. It's a risk/benefit calculation every time. The federal goons calculated that they faced no risk in filling him full of lead, so they assuaged their emotions with massive overkill. It's a textbook example of irresponsible gun use.
The signature vehicle of federal agents is a big SUV. So is the signature vehicle of egregious assholes who like to pick on cyclists, though any motor vehicle will do. We just tend to go with the stereotype of the monster truck as the ultimate emblem of Earth-raping, road-hogging, selfish bastards. Any unprotected human seems weak and puny with nothing but the moral high ground as we faced the armored cavalry. Taking a piece off of one of them seems like a righteous blow. We live in that curious space between a nation of laws and the reality that any individual temporarily annoyed could smash us an make a plausible case for why it wasn't their fault. We're just as likely to be prosecuted for striking a blow against the sacred property of a driver who threatens us.
At the moment, every citizen opposed to how the regime is conducting both foreign and domestic relations stands in that gap. As with cycling itself, some venues expose you to more constant danger than others. I don't mean side paths and bike parks representing safety. I mean that some places are much worse than others for traffic crowding, social and legal support, and driver hostility. Likewise, if you live where the regime currently sees no value in putting the squeeze on you, it's all theoretical, and perhaps unbelievable. If you're in one of the hot zones, you're under virtual occupation.
In places offering resistance to high pressure from the regime's agents, citizens have an advantage that cyclists do not. They're essentially doing Critical Mass, mobbing the agents with observers and sentinels who record proceedings and warn residents when the goons pull into a neighborhood. It reminds me of songbirds mobbing a bird of prey. Where cyclists draw massive ire with mass demonstrations that slow traffic, mobs of citizens defending their constitutional rights and those of their neighbors draw well deserved praise. It's the same principle of strength in numbers. We need that now. We'll need it for a long time. We'll need to bring it to the ballot box in November.
We'll see what happens.
