The other night I was riding my bike in New City, headed east minding my own business, blinking lights and headlight a blazing when a car (of course a large SUV) passing in the other direction slowed and the driver yelled "get off the road asshole."
This made me more upset than the random comments I get while riding a bike tend to make me. I'm not sure why, perhaps because it was a vehicle passing in the opposite direction—there's some understandable stupidity from those who are passing a bike and take the moment of caution required as a reason to blame the cyclist for a terrible day—but when you're going on a part of the road I'm not even occupying, that's just not cool.
I've lingered over the things I wish I'd said to him, something like "I can't get off the road, I'm in a rush to get home so that your mother can perform fellatio on me while your sister records the moment for posterity on my Canon G9—now with RAW shooting modes," but I demurred.
Instead I went on fuming, my night pretty shot as I imagined myself riding up the the SUV (he was stuck at the light for quite some time) reaching in and hitting his face on the horn.
Which brings me to my point.
Yet again on our bike club's blog a flame war broke out over a comment read wrong. Once again it was the same old people doing the same mis-interpretaton of events. And once again it was caused by someone who didn't really think carefully about the way they were saying something.
While I'm certainly guilty of this behavior—albeit mostly in email not on forums—I generally try to let them pass because I recognize that no one wins these kinds of conversations. Everyone gets hurt.
It makes me wonder a bit about the sense of tolerance we used to have in this country, or at least we supposedly used to have. I'm not sure that owning another human being counts as tolerance, and we've been pretty guilty of doing some other beastly things over the years here. But this country was founded so that individuals could seek "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Okay, tying a flame war into a systemic system of injustice is a tad spurious, but I think they're linked. I think that we, as a race tend to be exclusionary and petty, and that the Internet—and SUV driving yelling-guys, tend to just be the visible manifestation of that, like so much flotsam and jetsam on an ocean of grumpy pissed off folks.
eloquently said...
Posted by: DW | October 24, 2007 at 12:57 PM
Yeah, what he said
Posted by: Jenni | October 31, 2007 at 01:56 PM