People are crazy.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Once in a while there's an issue that sparks controversy, not because it's truly controversial, but because it seems to be about our values and the way we live, even if it impacts the majority minimally or not at all. 

Gay marriage: an obvious case in point.  We've had it in Massachusetts for over six years, and I defy anyone who still opposes it here to produce evidence of any harm it's done them (I mean the non-gay married folks, of course).

In Massachusetts, gay marriage is passé.  Bicycling, apparently, is the new battlefield in the ongoing Culture War.  We have so politicized every aspect of our lives that a bicycle lane along one mile of Mass. Ave. in Arlington is sparking hysteria among Tea Party types who feel that the government should stay the hell out of... building public roads? 

Really?

Is this a little like the Tea Baggers at all those town halls who didn't know that their Medicare was a government entitlement?

It's already a big cliché, but the truth is, no one joins the Tea Party because of the taxes.  They join the Tea Party because they see a tsunami of change headed their way, and they're too old and crotchety to move further inland.  I mean, when you're 71, like the the old codger who's spent forty grand trying to stop a bike path in downtown Arlington, you don't want to have to pick up and move every time somebody you don't like bicycles past your house. You might as well buy a Winnebago.



It's funny.  It used to be buses and commuter rail that people like this opposed, because it threatened to bring blacks out into the suburbs whites had fled to.  Now it's bicycle lanes, which obviously bring *gasp!* liberal bicylcely types, as Sarah Palin has called them (or at some point will, I'm sure). 

And they do have reason to worry, if Bella English, a columnist at the Globe and an angry cyclist, is any indication.  In her annual bicycle rant she rails against "overweight guys in overweight vehicles" who "throw things at us, curse at us, spit on us, pull out on us, cut us off, graze us, or stop abruptly right in front of us."

And why are they so angry? More cyclists mean fewer cars and less traffic. We aren’t guzzling gas like the big guy in the black pickup. And, unlike him, we’re burning calories.

Ha!  Take that, fatso!

And furthermore (Bella rants), "roads were originally built for bicycles, which predated cars."  So there!

Now, Bella. 

See, this is the problem with engaging crazy, irrational people on their own terms.  You start saying things like "roads were originally built for bicycles, which predated cars."

Quick history lesson:

c. 4500 BCE — horses first domesticated for riding.

4000 BCE — first known paved streets, city of Ur (ancient Sumer).

1817 CE — the "draizine" (or Laufmaschine, "running machine"), the forerunner of the modern bicycle, is introduced in Mannheim.

1885 CE — The world’s first automobile, also built in Mannheim, is rolled out by Karl Benz.

Are you with me so far?

While it is true that the bicycle predated the automobile, it does not follow that "roads were originally built for bicycles".  I don't know what kind of bicycle Bella rides, but mine doesn't do so well on slick Roman-era pavers, much less the gravel and small, broken stones with sharp edges that were the latest in 18th-century road engineering technology.

Dickensian urban cyclists (joking, people, joking) would have found the roadways in London impassable, what with the mud and heaps of horseshit everywhere...

The normal city horse produced between fifteen and thirty-five pounds of manure a day and about a quart of urine, usually distributed along the course of its route.... While cities made sporadic attempts to keep the streets clean, the manure was everywhere,along the roadway, heaped in piles...

In America, bicycles didn't come into wide use until the 1880s, but even a hundred years after the invention of the bicycle over ninety percent of roads were made of dirt, making them impassable by bike in mostly any kind of weather. 

Horses, of course, could handle it.  Which is why they were used for quick transport for millennia and roads built to accommodate them before carriages, bicycles, or automobiles came along.

Liberals: Camera Three.

Stop saying stupid, irrational things to defend and justify your perfectly rational points of view.  Just stop. 

The truth is, there's no reason why bicycle paths have to fit into the paranoid conspiracy of the Tea Party narrative. There's no reason driving a truck should be a patriotic family value while bicycling should be demonized as a communist plot. 

There's every reason for free marketeers to support innovation and entrepreneurial chutzpah in alternative energy and alternative transportation, for which there's an enormous potential market, not to mention supporting local business and community development — which includes "local roads" — not mere throughways.

That the right is thoroughly in thrall to Big Oil, Big Auto, and the Big Boxes shows the logical inconsistency at the core of their "belief system".  That Tea Baggers are too stupid to see that they're being used doesn't mean the rest of us have to legitimize an irrational and unreasonable point of view by spewing crazy ourselves. 

Remember.  There is nothing controversial about accommodating all modes of traffic on public streets.  Period.  Roads weren't originally built for bicycles, and they don't have to have been, but they can and should be now.

The binary discourse we're locked into, where the science of, say, geological time is made to compete with the fantasy of creationism, is not a framework where progressive political action can take place.  When truth is made to debate falsehood on falsehood's turf, the best you can hope for is a draw.  And that's precisely what we've got, which nicely serves the powers-that-be who have an interest in maintaining their status quo so long as it is profitable for them.

It ain't rocket science, peeps.  It's bread and circuses.

And with the number of college degrees earned in the US falling precipitously, it's more important than ever for intelligent people to remain... intelligent. 

And calm. 

Especially on the roadways.