When you can't please everyone...

This stunning human being in Columbus, Ohio, summed up what I would guess is the majority attitude among motorists, with his entry in a whimsical parade there to celebrate Independence Day. The sign on his door says, "I'll share the road when you follow the rules."

I considered a post titled "Don't ride like an asshole," but I realized after a nanosecond's thought that riders who draw attention by flamboyantly anarchistic behavior are only the excuse that motocentric road users throw up to justify their hostility. Many bad habits that ignorant or stubborn riders use, like riding against traffic, are embraced by the motocentric, because they reinforce the stereotype of the wheeled pedestrian. Bike riders belong somewhere, anywhere, other than in the lane, taking up valuable space and demanding a traffic flow that respects their humanity. Humanity ends at the door handle, pal. Once the motorist is sealed in the capsule, the only things that count are horsepower and cunning.

People who are generically hostile to bike riders will take exception to nearly anything a rider does. Add this to the hostility between biking subcultures themselves and nothing ever gets fixed. And I don't imagine it ever will. No single solution or workable set of solutions will please everyone. The yammering will continue, with occasional blood drawn, mostly from riders who get caught in the crossfire.

The cellist and I were ordered off the road this morning, by a motocentrist in a shit brown and pond scum green step-side pickup truck coming the opposite way. He was defending the rights of the poor motorists I had trapped behind me while I waited for the oncoming truck to clear the lane. To their credit, the motorists behind me took it all calmly, and passed safely and methodically once the oncoming driver had made his statement and gone on. It reminded me that angry people with simplistic points of view can throw a little or a lot of tension into what should be simply a normal piece of traffic flow. The offended truck driver would say the cellist and I were taking excessive liberties because we did not wobble along the right rim of the pavement, allowing any driver to pass at any time. Good luck explaining anything to someone like that.

I do believe there is a right way to ride on the public streets. I just know better than to put it forward as the one true path. It IS the one true path, but my advocacy will not hasten its discovery. Its own truth will guide riders to it, if they ride for enough years. It's a wide path, with probably half a dozen One True Alternate Routes and a couple of dozen special exceptions, but it's true. Perhaps the growing population of people with riding experience will infiltrate the motoring population to the point where cooperative behavior becomes a reflex.

Many motorists already do remarkably well. But then, the fact that many places don't get shot up by a miserable attention whore with an assault rifle is little comfort when you are in the place where it happens. Same deal when you're riding along and you meet the wrong sorehead driver. There's no defense, really. You just have to keep living in a way that sets a good example, and hope it becomes the universal choice.

There is no battle. There is no war. There is only patient teaching, endurance, and luck.

The work of hateful cowards

This item came up in my Facebook feed. Spring seems to have brought out the haters on both sides of the Atlantic:

http://road.cc/content/news/182405-barbed-wire-booby-trap-found-kent-cycle-trail

Tacks on a trail could be considered mischief. Most likely, they will only cause a rider inconvenience rather than bodily harm. But barbed wire strung across a trail is a premeditated assault on the rider, not just sabotage of the machine.

Traps are the work of cowards. Trappers may set them out of contempt, but they are also avoiding any confrontation or accounting for the harm they might cause.

Our species produces a certain percentage of damaged people who like to inflict pain. An even larger pool justifies acts of aggression -- even passive aggression -- because the targets of the aggression have aggrieved them in some way. In most cases, you can't settle things with a fight, because you can't kill a mindset. At best you can hope to educate someone out of one. Even then, sickos remain sickos.

As population density increases, we all get on each other's nerves. Whether we're really headed down the drain of the behavioral sink is still debated in the scientific community. The higher intellect of humans at least slows the process of total degeneration by keeping notions of conscience alive in a large percentage of us. That still does not protect us from the less-evolved types who think hunting each other is a fun and effective way to solve their problems.

The joker with the barbed wire should be tangled in a length of it and rolled down a bumpy slope, just for educational purposes. Or we just wait to see what karma comes up with on its own. It's always tempting to intervene and try to speed up the process.

The first priority is always to avoid the traps and cheat the cowards of their fun. If you can get it to blow back on them, that's a bonus. If you put too much thought and energy into it, you become part of the problem yourself.

This is The Renaissance of Hate

A friend in Des Moines, Iowa, just reported that persons unknown had dumped thumbtacks all over a section of bike trail, causing the sort of damage and inconvenience you would expect.

This trail is a segregated venue. These riders are not interfering with the holy motor vehicle traffic so beloved by Americans. Spiking their trail is an act of pure malice, singling out bike riders purely for being bike riders.

We live in a time when we are actively encouraged to give way to our prejudices and express them without reservation. Close borders. Harass, intimidate, beat up, and even kill "undesirables."

Talk radio hosts have been exposed numerous times suggesting that bike riders make perfectly legitimate targets for violent slapstick comedy. They never suggest that riders should get some hazard pay and a share of the residual income from any video coverage of these actions. It goes along with every other form of entertaining contempt peddled fiercely and continuously by people who have soapboxes large and small. The comment thread on any article about bicycling in the mainstream media devolves almost immediately into a collection of traded insults. It's just one aspect of a culture of intolerance that has been growing steadily since the backlash against "hippies" in the late 1970s and early '80s. It is blossoming now with creative expression of destructive tendencies.

We're in the Renaissance of Hate, when divisions mean more to people than coexistence. A large segment of humanity inclines toward duking things out and settling them now, rather than trying to bump along, accommodating each other as best we can. Another segment does try to keep building toward a universally tolerant society, but there are many details to iron out. The human propensity for simple mindedness and quick fixes throws land mines in front of any peace march to try to shut the gentle people up and let the men of action have their way.

I use the term men of action purposely. The culture of hate is sexist. It attracts many followers who are women, but they either think they can fight it out or they buy into the classic gender roles in which men make the big moves and women support them. In general, movements of intolerance try to keep people in their rigidly defined places. Amazing how totalitarian ideas can march in under a banner of freedom. They have specific, worthy recipients in mind when they talk about freedom.

Some things are deplorable and need to be opposed. Sometimes, forcefully delivered rhetoric is not wrong. That complicates analysis for the concerned citizen. But if someone is suggesting that it's okay to target anyone for unkind treatment, that's bad advice. "Hate the sin, love the sinner" is a shorthand way to remind yourself that a broad brush and a machine gun are ham fisted solutions.

At the start of every riding season, and at intervals during it, I wonder whether hatred or negligence will strike me or someone I hold dear. It's one more thing in the back of the mind when gearing up to take a simple bike ride.