The repairs in the queue at the shop are a metaphor for neglected problems. The pandemic bike boom has inspired millions of people across the country to dig out machines that they have ignored for years. It won't last, but for right now it devours time and resources. People are awakening to a need they didn't know they had. After a while, the furor will die down. Gas is really cheap right now, and businesses are reopening. Cycling will be forgotten again until the inevitable resurgence of infection leads to a new round of precautions. But by then we'll be going into winter, so commercial interest will swing to indoor diversions. By next spring we will be living in a very different world, though still beset by the same ancient human failings.
Before COVID-19 took over the headlines we were talking about the crisis in the environment. Then came the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd, and the country erupted in protest over the festering problem of racism and police brutality. Protests on that have flared up every time there is a high-profile case, but nothing gets fixed. This time, many good proposals are circulating to change the oppositional model of policing that combines lethally with underlying bias.
Change requires more than protest. It requires continuous and sometimes tedious contact with decision makers at all levels of government to keep them focused on more than just well-crafted words of inspiration for public display. But protest comes first to underscore the urgent need to fix this problem now. Consider how many times huge numbers of citizens have had to take to the streets just since the beginning of 2017. Every time they have been correct. Those issues remain acute. All problems ignored since the end of the 1960s are coming to a crisis at once.
I don't know what to do about the fact that some people are just assholes. We've all met them: the people who are looking for trouble. They are the result of many influences, susceptible to no single remedy. It's a human problem. In the idealized notion of a police force, our protectors in uniform are there to provide the muscle for citizens who are victimized by people who came to them looking for trouble. I have been grateful for sympathetic police officers a few times when they happened to be nearby in a confrontation with bullies in motor vehicles while I was riding my bike. I have also been stopped and ordered off of a highway by an officer who did not know -- and was in no mood to hear -- the actual laws regarding cycling on Maryland roadways at that time. As abuses of power go, it was nothing. I just had to wait for him to speed away and I could pull back onto the pavement and continue as I had been. It was 1982. The officer was black. We weren't hearing about police murdering people of color, or white people having any particular advantage in an arrest situation.
In my life I have been harassed by far more white people than Black people. This includes every event that crossed the line from unpleasant expressions of free speech to actual assault. If you say the word "criminal" to me, I imagine someone who looks like a redneck, or an untouchable dude in a suit. The vast majority of the people who have gone out of their way to be assholes to me have been "my own people." I would venture to say that "my own people" take the greatest pride in being assholes to other people. Is that what makes us "the master race?" Great.
It really hits home for bike riders when a racist, fascist asshole in full bike garb decides to be the terror of the bike path and brings national attention to himself as "a cyclist." All the news stories feature "cyclist" in the headline. Way to represent, dickhead.
While the protests and discussion center on the latest manifestations of the four centuries of white supremacy that have gone into the creation of our republic, our country's reprehensible approach to health care continues to burden all of us with higher costs and greater inconveniences as the novel coronavirus continues to spread. The systems of both personal and public health display more defects than competency. These defects, coincidentally, affect people of color more than white people. And the trouble and expense are just beginning, especially as Americans tire of the restrictions recommended to reduce the spread of the disease. They run out to mingle, feeling like they've paid their dues and deserve to get away with yet another indulgence. A young twerp came into the shop yesterday without a mask. He insisted that he was fine because he "hadn't been sick with anything in over a year." He went on to say that we were "backward" up here for continuing to observe precautions when the rest of the country is opening right up. He did stand six feet away after moving outdoors at the shop owner's request, but he wouldn't don the free mask we provided to remain indoors to complete his business.
As racism and police brutality overshadow COVID-19, COVID-19 overshadowed climate change and all other attention to environmental rape and pillage. Atmospheric CO2 just hit a new record level, and this May was the warmest on record. Interwoven with all of this is income inequality and the injustices perpetrated by concentrated wealth. If individual citizens are to be allowed unlimited wealth, government by the people demands corresponding leverage by the government to rein in the excesses of the wealthy. Is that going to happen? If so, how? Money is the real power. Citizens who vote to give a government responsibility must also vote to fund the government to execute those responsibilities. Otherwise, power rests solely in the hands of those who can pay for it. That's un-American even by the original white male supremacist standards of the US Constitution. The dreamers who framed that document imagined a nation of free people who prized education and had a sense of moral decency. I don't mean morals in the prissy sense of sexual repression and self righteous piety. I mean genuine identification with the challenges that we all face as human beings. James Madison's expectation that the wealthy would appreciate the contributions and indispensable value of the less well-off was practically communistic. It was certainly naive.
The saying "what goes around comes around" is not true. If you are in the privileged class and wealthy enough, you can dish out far more than you ever take in return. If you bought the police force, you can reasonably expect to be treated as a preferred customer. If you have no empathy, no compassion, and no moral compass, you're nothing but a menace to society. This can be expressed through direct personal violence, but is often expressed far more subtly by the ways in which income is gained and funds are bestowed. You can look like a good citizen and a pillar of the community. You can look like a harmless, fun loving, downright liberal kind of person.
A lot of us harmless, fun loving, downright liberal people were somewhat blindsided by the resurgent power of open racism since the public gains of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Once the firehoses were put away and the dogs were kenneled and the police forces started to be integrated ("They call me Mr. Tibbs"), virulent racism seemed to be defanged. There were still jokes, but they seemed more like jokes on the racists themselves, until you tuned in closely. Or maybe we knew some people who just wouldn't be cured, but we perceived them as powerless vestiges of a dying system. Martin Luther King Jr. himself had believed that the arc of history bends toward justice. You wouldn't think so now. Or at least you'd have to admit that many more hands than we realized are holding its metal and doing their best to bend it toward segregation and social stratification.
All problems intersect. Industrialized resource exploitation leads to environmental degradation and warfare. Warfare and environmental degradation lead to displaced populations. Displaced populations make their way to safer places, bringing cultures into conflict. Colonizers export their beliefs to the lands they enter, bringing cultures into conflict. And some cultures are pretty unlikable if you envision a world where we can all be harmless, fun loving and downright liberal. Colonizers using kidnapped labor set up centuries of conflict in the lands to which they imported that labor. Consumerism leads to resource depletion. Consumers judge their consumption based solely on whether they can afford it monetarily, rather than analyzing its wider social and environmental impacts. What example do they have, after all? The wealthy have forever taken the best that they could afford because they could afford it. Only the exceptional few make prodigious efforts to give a lot back, and that's only after they've profited massively from business as usual. Those few do a service to their lesser-known economic peers who put out a lot less, because they create an image of wealthy generosity, and bring up the averages for the whole bracket.
Underlying nearly every other problem is the idea that it's a good thing to want to have as much as you can get, and to keep trying to get more. We have pity and contempt for people who can't stop drinking, or can't control their sexual urges, or who can't stop themselves from pilfering things in stores, or a host of other compulsions, but we make heroes and role models of the people who seize control of as much of the money supply as possible and then dribble it out to the rest of us at their whim.The best salaries go to the people who support that system. The common good is judged by what's good for the people who already have it good.
There's a deep fear that if we make life too enjoyable for too many people they'll just lie around and breed like rodents. They'll gnaw and burrow and proliferate out of control. The benefits of civilization have to be earned by virtuous toil at prices often set by investors looking to profit personally, not divide the spoils among all the working participants. This can be less true among genuine small businesses whose gross revenues don't allow for a lot of profiteering from the top. The basic cost of even a poorly paid employee takes a big bite out of a small operation's income. And a poorly paid employee might not be the best expenditure compared to hiring someone with actual skill and trying to retain them. This describes a challenge facing small bike shops as equipment gets more and more complicated, but revenues are stagnant or declining.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Monday, June 08, 2020
Monday, March 16, 2020
Paradoxes of Pandemic Preparation and Protection
"Stock up and stay home."
-- Go out every day or two, to see if the stores have managed to replenish necessities cleaned out by panic buying and hoarding.
"Wash your hands as often as possible."
-- Sign in the drug store: "Restrooms closed for the duration of the epidemic." Also, hand sanitizer not available until further notice. If you're not carrying your own, you are S.O.L.
The grocery store still has a dispenser of sanitizing wipes where the shopping carts are parked. No one has yanked them all out and run away with them.
At the bike shop, it's hardly business as usual, because very little is as usual right now. The winter never really happened, so it's looking like early bike season a month earlier than early used to be. In previous weak winters, sometimes people would show up with their bikes, but more often they don't. This year, we've had a small early surge. It's too small even to be a surge, but more than a blip. One customer who dropped her bike for an early tuneup is a Massachusetts refugee who was told to work from home and decided to come up to Wolfe City and work out of her second home rather than stay down in plague-ridden Massachusetts.
The bike business was already hampered by tariffs and by the massive disruption of Chinese manufacturing as the new coronavirus erupted over there. But the shop owner had to get bikes in, so we're waiting for a few dozen to show up. They will all need to be assembled in case we get a season instead of a nationwide total shutdown.
The schools are closed for three weeks. That means our trainee is available for more hours, although he still has to keep up his assigned schoolwork. We haven't had a lot of customers come in and hang around, so the social distancing thing sort of works. Trainee is a bike racer, so he's already averse to getting sick. The rest of us live in the animal fashion of the working poor. We know instinctively that we cannot get sick or injured. If we don't get any business because there's a nationwide shutdown, or we can't work because too many of us are sick, we know that it's the end for us. There is no national support system, and little hope that this crisis will change that.
Americans have long prided themselves on doing as little as possible for each other. I don't know where that E Pluribus Unum bullshit came from. The obvious operating principle throughout my working life has been Every Man for Himself. We are free to associate, and many do, but those associations have clearly delineated membership. Many of them make no secret that their perimeter is fortified and their members are armed. Others are more benevolent. I suppose we're lucky that the hard-core authoritarians have not quite managed to seize control of national policy, since the benevolent ones have failed utterly to inspire national acceptance.
If we should have to shut down, or I have to be quarantined, I could work from home. I have almost all of the basic tools for a commercial bike repair shop. I can't work on hydraulics at home, and I have not kept up with the 15 or 20 different bottom bracket tools you need to service all comers, but I could get a lot of routine crap done. Somehow the bikes would need to get to me. Either the customers would have to truck them out here, or the shop would have to bring them. They could also provide any special tools a particular repair required, and douse everything with the appropriate chemicals to purify it after it came back from the leper colony. Let's hope it doesn't come to that. It would be cumbersome. More likely nobody would bother.
For now, we sanitize obsessively and wash our hands until they're scaly. We'd been doing gloves for a few years already, just to keep some of the grease, lubes, and solvents off of our skin. We have not adopted masks yet, except for the procedures that made them advisable already. But now you look at every incoming person as a potential suspect.
The cellist arrived at Portland Jetport at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday night. Because she fell while hiking a couple of weeks ago, she's been on crutches, and applied for a wheelchair to get through the airport. That meant that I was standing in the greeting area while everyone else got off of two flights that had arrived at about the same time. I watched them stream in and come down a stairway and an escalator to reach the lower level where the baggage claim and the street exits are. A few wore masks. One or two wore gloves. No one made much effort to stand apart, because the system is not set up for it. We arranged ourselves around the conveyor belts in the baggage claim area like bears waiting along a river bank for salmon. When the right one comes along, dart a paw in and snatch it out. The cellist's wheelchair driver waited patiently. He was a quiet, tall young man, probably part of the refugee community that has settled in urban Maine. His presence was calming.
The cellist and I have barely touched since she got here. She extended her stay when the governor of Maryland shut the schools, so she'll be here longer than the two-week quarantine period required for people coming from known hot zones, like Italy. Meanwhile, I'm still potentially exposed every day that I go to work or make a quick sweep through the grocery store because we still can. We don't want to dig into our stash of isolation foods until we know that we have no choice. Otherwise, we might have too little at the point that everything shuts down for real. If one of us gets sick, the other one is almost certain to. But she couldn't stay where she was, because her living arrangements are pretty marginal down there. Her chances of exposure were much greater. That thing that Kurt Vonnegut supposedly wrote, about going into the arts? Yeah, that's bullshit. Go into fucking finance, people. Become a corporate lawyer. Just go ahead and rape the planet and fleece the chumps for your own fat gains, because it's all for nothing anyway. We can't vote away the Apocalypse any more than someone can pray away the gay.
The internet has developed its own familiar symptoms of proud ignorance, conspiracy theories, doomsayers, spiritual advisers, real scientific medical information, pseudoscientific crapola, and malware. It's a perfect laboratory demonstration of every debate about social, political, and environmental issues. It's like watching a Petri dish getting obliterated under a slimy, furry culture going out of control.
Good luck, everybody.
-- Go out every day or two, to see if the stores have managed to replenish necessities cleaned out by panic buying and hoarding.
"Wash your hands as often as possible."
-- Sign in the drug store: "Restrooms closed for the duration of the epidemic." Also, hand sanitizer not available until further notice. If you're not carrying your own, you are S.O.L.
The grocery store still has a dispenser of sanitizing wipes where the shopping carts are parked. No one has yanked them all out and run away with them.
At the bike shop, it's hardly business as usual, because very little is as usual right now. The winter never really happened, so it's looking like early bike season a month earlier than early used to be. In previous weak winters, sometimes people would show up with their bikes, but more often they don't. This year, we've had a small early surge. It's too small even to be a surge, but more than a blip. One customer who dropped her bike for an early tuneup is a Massachusetts refugee who was told to work from home and decided to come up to Wolfe City and work out of her second home rather than stay down in plague-ridden Massachusetts.
The bike business was already hampered by tariffs and by the massive disruption of Chinese manufacturing as the new coronavirus erupted over there. But the shop owner had to get bikes in, so we're waiting for a few dozen to show up. They will all need to be assembled in case we get a season instead of a nationwide total shutdown.
The schools are closed for three weeks. That means our trainee is available for more hours, although he still has to keep up his assigned schoolwork. We haven't had a lot of customers come in and hang around, so the social distancing thing sort of works. Trainee is a bike racer, so he's already averse to getting sick. The rest of us live in the animal fashion of the working poor. We know instinctively that we cannot get sick or injured. If we don't get any business because there's a nationwide shutdown, or we can't work because too many of us are sick, we know that it's the end for us. There is no national support system, and little hope that this crisis will change that.
Americans have long prided themselves on doing as little as possible for each other. I don't know where that E Pluribus Unum bullshit came from. The obvious operating principle throughout my working life has been Every Man for Himself. We are free to associate, and many do, but those associations have clearly delineated membership. Many of them make no secret that their perimeter is fortified and their members are armed. Others are more benevolent. I suppose we're lucky that the hard-core authoritarians have not quite managed to seize control of national policy, since the benevolent ones have failed utterly to inspire national acceptance.
If we should have to shut down, or I have to be quarantined, I could work from home. I have almost all of the basic tools for a commercial bike repair shop. I can't work on hydraulics at home, and I have not kept up with the 15 or 20 different bottom bracket tools you need to service all comers, but I could get a lot of routine crap done. Somehow the bikes would need to get to me. Either the customers would have to truck them out here, or the shop would have to bring them. They could also provide any special tools a particular repair required, and douse everything with the appropriate chemicals to purify it after it came back from the leper colony. Let's hope it doesn't come to that. It would be cumbersome. More likely nobody would bother.
For now, we sanitize obsessively and wash our hands until they're scaly. We'd been doing gloves for a few years already, just to keep some of the grease, lubes, and solvents off of our skin. We have not adopted masks yet, except for the procedures that made them advisable already. But now you look at every incoming person as a potential suspect.
The cellist arrived at Portland Jetport at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday night. Because she fell while hiking a couple of weeks ago, she's been on crutches, and applied for a wheelchair to get through the airport. That meant that I was standing in the greeting area while everyone else got off of two flights that had arrived at about the same time. I watched them stream in and come down a stairway and an escalator to reach the lower level where the baggage claim and the street exits are. A few wore masks. One or two wore gloves. No one made much effort to stand apart, because the system is not set up for it. We arranged ourselves around the conveyor belts in the baggage claim area like bears waiting along a river bank for salmon. When the right one comes along, dart a paw in and snatch it out. The cellist's wheelchair driver waited patiently. He was a quiet, tall young man, probably part of the refugee community that has settled in urban Maine. His presence was calming.
The cellist and I have barely touched since she got here. She extended her stay when the governor of Maryland shut the schools, so she'll be here longer than the two-week quarantine period required for people coming from known hot zones, like Italy. Meanwhile, I'm still potentially exposed every day that I go to work or make a quick sweep through the grocery store because we still can. We don't want to dig into our stash of isolation foods until we know that we have no choice. Otherwise, we might have too little at the point that everything shuts down for real. If one of us gets sick, the other one is almost certain to. But she couldn't stay where she was, because her living arrangements are pretty marginal down there. Her chances of exposure were much greater. That thing that Kurt Vonnegut supposedly wrote, about going into the arts? Yeah, that's bullshit. Go into fucking finance, people. Become a corporate lawyer. Just go ahead and rape the planet and fleece the chumps for your own fat gains, because it's all for nothing anyway. We can't vote away the Apocalypse any more than someone can pray away the gay.
The internet has developed its own familiar symptoms of proud ignorance, conspiracy theories, doomsayers, spiritual advisers, real scientific medical information, pseudoscientific crapola, and malware. It's a perfect laboratory demonstration of every debate about social, political, and environmental issues. It's like watching a Petri dish getting obliterated under a slimy, furry culture going out of control.
Good luck, everybody.
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
Guns and Bicycles
After years of mental drought and increasing depression, I suddenly received a request for some cartoons to be used in political advertising by a local group. They wanted clear, simple cartoons to illustrate various current political issues.
The first one was easy. It supports environmental science in governmental policy. I was able to spruce up a piece I'd sent them as a sample and submit it as the pay copy. But the second assignment supports gun control. I wrote about this dilemma on Brain Lynt today, so I won't repeat the whole essay here.
I researched hunting rifles so that I could try to present a nuanced situation as fairly as possible in a literally black and white graphic. The political group takes a firm position, but the case is far from simple. The two sides throw statistics and Constitutional interpretations at each other, and neither side is convinced. One single sentence in our constitution has made the country a great place to be a homicidal paranoid. The group that has hired me supports the "assault weapon" ban, and other measures to restrict firing rate and magazine capacity. Those seem sensible, so I wanted to see what the counter-arguments were.
Being a peace and love hippie type, I never got into guns and gun culture. I've shot guns, and had them pointed at me, but I wasn't turned on by the hardware or the activity. I have a couple at home for defensive purposes, but there again I'm more likely to grab something else when I hear a noise at night. Maybe I'll regret my life choices when civilization collapses next month and we're all suddenly living in the wild west again, but I do hear that it's easy to get a gun whenever you want one. That's one of the primary arguments against gun control. Apparently, you can go to just about any shopping center parking lot and find an arms dealer peddling Glocks out of his trunk. Maybe. Probably not.
As I read through various lists of "best deer rifles" I saw how the reviewers included something for everybody. Militarily-styled rifles were on every list, but they were never the first choice. The reviewers included them for people who were already inclined that way.
Outsiders come at the gun control debate viewing gun owners and users as a monolithic block, the way outsiders come at debates over cycling viewing all riders as a monolithic block. As soon as you look a little more closely you find gun owners who support various controls, based on their own point of view, just as you find riders who support specific types of riding. You can find regular users in either general category -- gun owners or bike owners -- who will support points of view held by outsiders who are partly or entirely unfamiliar with the details of either activity. Because ownership of either guns or bicycles encompasses such a huge cross-section of the population, there are few broad-brush proposals that don't severely inhibit the freedom of some users. When you're dealing with an activity protected in the Bill of Rights, you can't just brush it off unless you want to consider letting some other constitutionally-protected things get brushed off.
Not every gun user likes all guns. Not every gun user uses them for their lethal potential. All guns do basically the same thing, go bang and make a little projectile come flying out of the tube, but the power and destination of that little projectile can differ widely. Bicycles all appear to work basically the same way and do basically the same thing, until you look more closely at where they're ridden and how.
Guns still kill more people than bicycles do. Even if a gun owner doesn't use it for its lethal potential, guns weren't invented just for perforating paper or plinking cans. The desire to control their use is understandable. I support the concept. But the solution will not be something simple enough to depict in a single panel cartoon. As long as they're considered a legitimate part of daily life, and possession is enshrined as a right, any limitation on them risks impinging on what would be a justifiable use. Even militarily-styled weapons apparently have non-homicidal uses for lead-heads who want to deliver a lot of rounds in a hurry. If you're hunting something with no bag limit, that moves fast, you might want that quick-firing, shorter weapon. While I am not into killing for fun, and I wish no one else was either, that's a philosophical debate that can go on for several more centuries. In the meantime, it's legal in a lot of places.
The first one was easy. It supports environmental science in governmental policy. I was able to spruce up a piece I'd sent them as a sample and submit it as the pay copy. But the second assignment supports gun control. I wrote about this dilemma on Brain Lynt today, so I won't repeat the whole essay here.
I researched hunting rifles so that I could try to present a nuanced situation as fairly as possible in a literally black and white graphic. The political group takes a firm position, but the case is far from simple. The two sides throw statistics and Constitutional interpretations at each other, and neither side is convinced. One single sentence in our constitution has made the country a great place to be a homicidal paranoid. The group that has hired me supports the "assault weapon" ban, and other measures to restrict firing rate and magazine capacity. Those seem sensible, so I wanted to see what the counter-arguments were.
Being a peace and love hippie type, I never got into guns and gun culture. I've shot guns, and had them pointed at me, but I wasn't turned on by the hardware or the activity. I have a couple at home for defensive purposes, but there again I'm more likely to grab something else when I hear a noise at night. Maybe I'll regret my life choices when civilization collapses next month and we're all suddenly living in the wild west again, but I do hear that it's easy to get a gun whenever you want one. That's one of the primary arguments against gun control. Apparently, you can go to just about any shopping center parking lot and find an arms dealer peddling Glocks out of his trunk. Maybe. Probably not.
As I read through various lists of "best deer rifles" I saw how the reviewers included something for everybody. Militarily-styled rifles were on every list, but they were never the first choice. The reviewers included them for people who were already inclined that way.
Outsiders come at the gun control debate viewing gun owners and users as a monolithic block, the way outsiders come at debates over cycling viewing all riders as a monolithic block. As soon as you look a little more closely you find gun owners who support various controls, based on their own point of view, just as you find riders who support specific types of riding. You can find regular users in either general category -- gun owners or bike owners -- who will support points of view held by outsiders who are partly or entirely unfamiliar with the details of either activity. Because ownership of either guns or bicycles encompasses such a huge cross-section of the population, there are few broad-brush proposals that don't severely inhibit the freedom of some users. When you're dealing with an activity protected in the Bill of Rights, you can't just brush it off unless you want to consider letting some other constitutionally-protected things get brushed off.
Not every gun user likes all guns. Not every gun user uses them for their lethal potential. All guns do basically the same thing, go bang and make a little projectile come flying out of the tube, but the power and destination of that little projectile can differ widely. Bicycles all appear to work basically the same way and do basically the same thing, until you look more closely at where they're ridden and how.
Guns still kill more people than bicycles do. Even if a gun owner doesn't use it for its lethal potential, guns weren't invented just for perforating paper or plinking cans. The desire to control their use is understandable. I support the concept. But the solution will not be something simple enough to depict in a single panel cartoon. As long as they're considered a legitimate part of daily life, and possession is enshrined as a right, any limitation on them risks impinging on what would be a justifiable use. Even militarily-styled weapons apparently have non-homicidal uses for lead-heads who want to deliver a lot of rounds in a hurry. If you're hunting something with no bag limit, that moves fast, you might want that quick-firing, shorter weapon. While I am not into killing for fun, and I wish no one else was either, that's a philosophical debate that can go on for several more centuries. In the meantime, it's legal in a lot of places.
Tuesday, September 13, 2016
Another side to Trump supporters
In this year's dismal race for the presidency of the United States, supporters of Republican nominee Donald Trump have been portrayed as violent, bigoted, ignorant thugs. While he does seem to poll very well with that demographic, that makes my roadside observation all the more thought provoking.
You might expect a violent, bigoted, ignorant thug to drive in violent, bigoted, thuggish ways. But on my bike commute, where I am exposed to every passing vehicle, cars and trucks emblazoned with Trump stickers have been among the most careful and polite on the way by. That's not to say they have been the majority of the careful and polite, only that they have been notably so.
This fact does not shed any kinder light on the rhetoric and leadership potential of Trump, or the greater wisdom of his supporters. If I rode long enough on the right roads, I might well encounter some of the more violent and thuggish ones. But it does indicate that a significant number of the voters who have chosen The Donald in fact possess a level of human sensitivity that gets bleached out in the harsh stereotyping of political propaganda. Not only is this unfair to them, it also oversimplifies the issues any candidate -- and eventual leader -- needs to deal with. It turns diverse humanity into a homogenized lump, to love or loathe, to join or eradicate.
Beware the dehumanizers. Once you put all the bad stuff under a label and apply the label to a bunch of others, you can too easily develop a false sense of immunity to your own evil. You lose the ability to consider all the human psychology that leads to these concentrations of destructive tendencies.
Starting well before the Trump phenomenon, I have noticed exemplary passing behavior from people whose bumper stickers make me despair for the future of the human species. The stickers still make me despair for the future of the human species, because they reflect beliefs that are going to tear civilization apart, but in the meantime the people themselves seem strangely kind.
I don't know what I look like to a motorist. Maybe I'm so obviously a white guy that the bigots figure they'll cut me a break, even though I am clotting up the motorway with my bicycle.
Nearly everyone thinks they're doing the right thing. Maybe some of the more egregious sleazeballs know on a deeper level that they are fooling themselves, but at least they go to the trouble of rationalizing their behavior on a conscious level. The leaders who send their minions to do hideous, hopeless things tell their followers that it serves a greater good. The greater good of an evil cause is still evil, but below the leadership level it can be hard to sort out the level of zealotry in the ranks. The leaders might well be cynical manipulators, using their followers like toilet paper. The toilet paper stays neatly rolled in uniform squares, loyally waiting to be pulled off and expended.
The fact that Trump can appeal to people who are not violent, bigoted, ignorant thugs could help to propel the violent, bigoted, ignorant thugs to publicly visible levels of power, rather than functioning as the dark and deadly undercurrent they've been up to this point. More likely, they will be turned back at the election, and subside into the jagged landscape scarred by philosophical fault lines, to be forgotten until they snap. The fact that they are so numerous today proves that you cannot force people to evolve by mandating certain behaviors. You can stigmatize the behavior so that a wise bigot tries to blend in just to get by. Over time -- a very long time -- the quality of alienation may fade. But humans have many centuries invested in our differences, and really only decades in pursuit of something more inclusive.
You might expect a violent, bigoted, ignorant thug to drive in violent, bigoted, thuggish ways. But on my bike commute, where I am exposed to every passing vehicle, cars and trucks emblazoned with Trump stickers have been among the most careful and polite on the way by. That's not to say they have been the majority of the careful and polite, only that they have been notably so.
This fact does not shed any kinder light on the rhetoric and leadership potential of Trump, or the greater wisdom of his supporters. If I rode long enough on the right roads, I might well encounter some of the more violent and thuggish ones. But it does indicate that a significant number of the voters who have chosen The Donald in fact possess a level of human sensitivity that gets bleached out in the harsh stereotyping of political propaganda. Not only is this unfair to them, it also oversimplifies the issues any candidate -- and eventual leader -- needs to deal with. It turns diverse humanity into a homogenized lump, to love or loathe, to join or eradicate.
Beware the dehumanizers. Once you put all the bad stuff under a label and apply the label to a bunch of others, you can too easily develop a false sense of immunity to your own evil. You lose the ability to consider all the human psychology that leads to these concentrations of destructive tendencies.
Starting well before the Trump phenomenon, I have noticed exemplary passing behavior from people whose bumper stickers make me despair for the future of the human species. The stickers still make me despair for the future of the human species, because they reflect beliefs that are going to tear civilization apart, but in the meantime the people themselves seem strangely kind.
I don't know what I look like to a motorist. Maybe I'm so obviously a white guy that the bigots figure they'll cut me a break, even though I am clotting up the motorway with my bicycle.
Nearly everyone thinks they're doing the right thing. Maybe some of the more egregious sleazeballs know on a deeper level that they are fooling themselves, but at least they go to the trouble of rationalizing their behavior on a conscious level. The leaders who send their minions to do hideous, hopeless things tell their followers that it serves a greater good. The greater good of an evil cause is still evil, but below the leadership level it can be hard to sort out the level of zealotry in the ranks. The leaders might well be cynical manipulators, using their followers like toilet paper. The toilet paper stays neatly rolled in uniform squares, loyally waiting to be pulled off and expended.
The fact that Trump can appeal to people who are not violent, bigoted, ignorant thugs could help to propel the violent, bigoted, ignorant thugs to publicly visible levels of power, rather than functioning as the dark and deadly undercurrent they've been up to this point. More likely, they will be turned back at the election, and subside into the jagged landscape scarred by philosophical fault lines, to be forgotten until they snap. The fact that they are so numerous today proves that you cannot force people to evolve by mandating certain behaviors. You can stigmatize the behavior so that a wise bigot tries to blend in just to get by. Over time -- a very long time -- the quality of alienation may fade. But humans have many centuries invested in our differences, and really only decades in pursuit of something more inclusive.
Saturday, December 28, 2013
Money
Long before the recent news blip about Chicago's proposed bike tax I was already thinking about how America would react to a surge in transportation cycling. We would be monetized, of course.
The concept of cyclists as freeloaders is a major rallying point for the champions of motoring. You can explain about how taxation really works and the relative burden non-motorized users place on infrastructure until you run out of breath. A large percentage of the opponents of cycling simply will not believe you. Cyclists are parasites. Every improvement made for our benefit adds to our perceived debt.
I am willing to look at a full and honest audit to see whether cyclists are holding up their end. But a bicycle can be ridden in so many places and different ways that it would be hard to draw a firm line around the bicyclists who owe society and the ones who may safely and freely play in their designated areas where they don't bother the grownups.
Every form of mobility except bicycling and walking has a price tag attached to it. And, if you walk to the bus or the light rail, even if you don't get a seat you pay a fare. Wherever people gather you end up forking out to hang around. So, inevitably, bicyclists come under pressure to dig in the pocket lint for their contribution. The more successful we become, the more people will want a piece of the action. It's the American way.
Is there any chance we'll discuss the issues rationally, as cooperating adults? Not if our entire political history is any indication. But one can hope. Everything has a true cost. It needs to be fairly divided once we know what it is. Then we know what's reasonable and what's excessive.
The concept of cyclists as freeloaders is a major rallying point for the champions of motoring. You can explain about how taxation really works and the relative burden non-motorized users place on infrastructure until you run out of breath. A large percentage of the opponents of cycling simply will not believe you. Cyclists are parasites. Every improvement made for our benefit adds to our perceived debt.
I am willing to look at a full and honest audit to see whether cyclists are holding up their end. But a bicycle can be ridden in so many places and different ways that it would be hard to draw a firm line around the bicyclists who owe society and the ones who may safely and freely play in their designated areas where they don't bother the grownups.
Every form of mobility except bicycling and walking has a price tag attached to it. And, if you walk to the bus or the light rail, even if you don't get a seat you pay a fare. Wherever people gather you end up forking out to hang around. So, inevitably, bicyclists come under pressure to dig in the pocket lint for their contribution. The more successful we become, the more people will want a piece of the action. It's the American way.
Is there any chance we'll discuss the issues rationally, as cooperating adults? Not if our entire political history is any indication. But one can hope. Everything has a true cost. It needs to be fairly divided once we know what it is. Then we know what's reasonable and what's excessive.
Friday, September 06, 2013
Cars are people too
Owning and traveling in a car have become prerequisites to full citizenship in this country. Anyone who walks, rides a bike or uses public transit is viewed as transportationally impaired rather than drivers being viewed as transportationally privileged.
I've seen nothing in the media about this phenomenon. It's at least as burdensome as the cost of a college education -- if not more so -- because every working stiff needs wheels to get to the job, no matter what the job pays or what education was needed to secure it. Owning a car has become the norm. Therefore, anyone who does not go by car is subnormal.
Plenty of people go to their jobs without using an automobile. In cities the carless don't stand out as conspicuously, although the bicyclists among the carless do. Bicyclists always stand out, except when someone doesn't see one before, during or after a collision.
With the least bit of open driving room, motorist domination takes full effect. The road is almost a sacred space, consecrated to their unimpeded speed. Many of them do accommodate cyclists, but in many places it takes a special effort to do so. If there were no cyclists, motorists would not miss them or invent a substitute.
If we had gone straight from four legs (equine) to four wheels (automotive), the evolution would have been methodical and complete. In rural areas one might have to drive past someone riding a horse, but equestrians are rare on the public right-of-way. The old way would have been neatly eradicated by the new. The bicycle screwed everything up. It was much cheaper to have and to house than a horse. It proliferated before the automobile did, and has refused to disappear. It has many practical and fun applications. And it's far less expensive to have and to house than an automobile.
I admit that sitting on my ass in a car and hopping out at my destination in normal clothing can be seductively convenient. When I took to the bicycle I lived in a town and had no money. I needed to travel cheaply and I could ride my short hops in regular clothing. Only when I moved to the boonies did my commute turn into a longish open-road ride. Bike clothing is important for comfort and efficiency.
Anyone who has not gotten hooked on cycling can't possibly understand how compelling it is. Normal people, normal drivers and the young tads who yearn to become drivers, find us incomprehensibly stubborn and willfully stupid to forgo the vast benefits of motorized transportation.
As summer ended I noticed the seasonal uptick in motorist aggression that comes every year. SADS, September Asshole Driver Syndrome, occurs as everyone gets back to the humdrum grind of school and work. A cyclist seems to mock these toilers. They can't understand how anyone gets to go play around in the street, blocking traffic on a wobbly two-wheeler, when everyone else is getting back to virtuous labor.
Even those who get paid to enforce the law don't really understand the ones that pertain to cyclists. One of Wolfeboro's finest actually hit the lights and yelled at a cyclist to "use the crosswalk" after the rider legally entered traffic from a side street onto Main Street. Down in Rye, the police chief raced out to stop a group ride on Route 1A, an immensely popular cycling route, because motorists had phoned in to complain that the bike riders were impeding traffic by not riding single file to the far right. The RSA he cited is only a fraction of the laws relating to cyclists, but it's the little piece of scripture he held firmly to support his point of view. The cars must get through.
We all need to get along. The public right-of-way and the transportation system in total need to work for all modes of human transportation. The system needs to be adaptable enough to accommodate shifts in usage, too. If a whole lot of people suddenly decided to ride a bike or walk, they should be able to do so. At the same time, those who really must drive -- and even those who merely choose to -- should not be grossly restricted in their ability to take advantage of the capabilities of their machinery. Maybe the answer is to adjust the capability of the motorized machinery to restrict it to cooperative sizes, speeds and maneuverability.
I would be willing and happy to put my car on a train for the long cross-country hauls, rather than put up with the hours of driving required to travel faster than the speed of enjoyment across hundreds of miles. I would be equally happy -- more happy, in fact -- to be able to roll onto a train with my bike when time does not permit me to pedal a long distance to a place where I might like to have my independent wheels when I get there.
I realize that surrendering the speed and the schedule to a mass transit system makes it harder to peel off at that enticing exit to see something that catches your eye. This is more a concern for the motorist than the cyclist. If we had roll-on access to all passenger rail systems a cyclist could ride the rails for only the selected portion of any normal rail route and hop off to explore various destinations. An auto-train would be much more expensive and restrictive because of the size of cars. Those trips would need to be much more fully planned. A car-train would have to maintain speed and limit stops in order to get antsy drivers across the wide-open spaces at a speed as good as, or better than, they could make by themselves.
Meanwhile, I have to go annoy people by pedaling to work. I'm late as usual.
I've seen nothing in the media about this phenomenon. It's at least as burdensome as the cost of a college education -- if not more so -- because every working stiff needs wheels to get to the job, no matter what the job pays or what education was needed to secure it. Owning a car has become the norm. Therefore, anyone who does not go by car is subnormal.
Plenty of people go to their jobs without using an automobile. In cities the carless don't stand out as conspicuously, although the bicyclists among the carless do. Bicyclists always stand out, except when someone doesn't see one before, during or after a collision.
With the least bit of open driving room, motorist domination takes full effect. The road is almost a sacred space, consecrated to their unimpeded speed. Many of them do accommodate cyclists, but in many places it takes a special effort to do so. If there were no cyclists, motorists would not miss them or invent a substitute.
If we had gone straight from four legs (equine) to four wheels (automotive), the evolution would have been methodical and complete. In rural areas one might have to drive past someone riding a horse, but equestrians are rare on the public right-of-way. The old way would have been neatly eradicated by the new. The bicycle screwed everything up. It was much cheaper to have and to house than a horse. It proliferated before the automobile did, and has refused to disappear. It has many practical and fun applications. And it's far less expensive to have and to house than an automobile.
I admit that sitting on my ass in a car and hopping out at my destination in normal clothing can be seductively convenient. When I took to the bicycle I lived in a town and had no money. I needed to travel cheaply and I could ride my short hops in regular clothing. Only when I moved to the boonies did my commute turn into a longish open-road ride. Bike clothing is important for comfort and efficiency.
Anyone who has not gotten hooked on cycling can't possibly understand how compelling it is. Normal people, normal drivers and the young tads who yearn to become drivers, find us incomprehensibly stubborn and willfully stupid to forgo the vast benefits of motorized transportation.
As summer ended I noticed the seasonal uptick in motorist aggression that comes every year. SADS, September Asshole Driver Syndrome, occurs as everyone gets back to the humdrum grind of school and work. A cyclist seems to mock these toilers. They can't understand how anyone gets to go play around in the street, blocking traffic on a wobbly two-wheeler, when everyone else is getting back to virtuous labor.
Even those who get paid to enforce the law don't really understand the ones that pertain to cyclists. One of Wolfeboro's finest actually hit the lights and yelled at a cyclist to "use the crosswalk" after the rider legally entered traffic from a side street onto Main Street. Down in Rye, the police chief raced out to stop a group ride on Route 1A, an immensely popular cycling route, because motorists had phoned in to complain that the bike riders were impeding traffic by not riding single file to the far right. The RSA he cited is only a fraction of the laws relating to cyclists, but it's the little piece of scripture he held firmly to support his point of view. The cars must get through.
We all need to get along. The public right-of-way and the transportation system in total need to work for all modes of human transportation. The system needs to be adaptable enough to accommodate shifts in usage, too. If a whole lot of people suddenly decided to ride a bike or walk, they should be able to do so. At the same time, those who really must drive -- and even those who merely choose to -- should not be grossly restricted in their ability to take advantage of the capabilities of their machinery. Maybe the answer is to adjust the capability of the motorized machinery to restrict it to cooperative sizes, speeds and maneuverability.
I would be willing and happy to put my car on a train for the long cross-country hauls, rather than put up with the hours of driving required to travel faster than the speed of enjoyment across hundreds of miles. I would be equally happy -- more happy, in fact -- to be able to roll onto a train with my bike when time does not permit me to pedal a long distance to a place where I might like to have my independent wheels when I get there.
I realize that surrendering the speed and the schedule to a mass transit system makes it harder to peel off at that enticing exit to see something that catches your eye. This is more a concern for the motorist than the cyclist. If we had roll-on access to all passenger rail systems a cyclist could ride the rails for only the selected portion of any normal rail route and hop off to explore various destinations. An auto-train would be much more expensive and restrictive because of the size of cars. Those trips would need to be much more fully planned. A car-train would have to maintain speed and limit stops in order to get antsy drivers across the wide-open spaces at a speed as good as, or better than, they could make by themselves.
Meanwhile, I have to go annoy people by pedaling to work. I'm late as usual.
Thursday, November 08, 2012
I'd rather be drawing (or writing)
Steve A's pensive post on DFW Point to Point this morning got me thinking about all that goes into running a civilized country with a citizen-involved government. Not that it's hard to get me going in that direction. It's been my preoccupation for my entire adult life.
When I'm not a surly bike mechanic and sport shop grunt I draw cartoons. Whatever hopes I had for a livelihood in that realm have largely faded, but many influential creators have lived in relative poverty and obscurity. If you want something drawn or written, you have to sit down and do it. All the rest of the crap, the day job, the chores, are just what you do to clear the path to the desk and buy some time to sit at it.
The bike business lets me work in an area where any gains are good. If everyone rode a bike the world would simply be a better place. That's not to say the bike industry is the best judge of what will promote all the best aspects of the activity. Far from it. But someone has to interpret the crap for customers and help them keep their machines in good working order. I don't mind putting in some time there.
So...social issues.
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There's no shortage of them.
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When I'm not a surly bike mechanic and sport shop grunt I draw cartoons. Whatever hopes I had for a livelihood in that realm have largely faded, but many influential creators have lived in relative poverty and obscurity. If you want something drawn or written, you have to sit down and do it. All the rest of the crap, the day job, the chores, are just what you do to clear the path to the desk and buy some time to sit at it.
The bike business lets me work in an area where any gains are good. If everyone rode a bike the world would simply be a better place. That's not to say the bike industry is the best judge of what will promote all the best aspects of the activity. Far from it. But someone has to interpret the crap for customers and help them keep their machines in good working order. I don't mind putting in some time there.
So...social issues.
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He's not getting any better. Should we put on another leech?
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I'm sorry, but due to the state of the economy I'm going to have to let you go.
And so on.
I post them at The Back of Class. It may go weeks or months without an update. Then I might have a good few days and dump a bunch in all at once.
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