The Republican candidate for governor in Colorado has sounded a warning: promoting bicycle riding threatens our personal freedoms.From today's Denver Post:
Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes is warning voters that Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper's policies, particularly his efforts to boost bike riding, are "converting Denver into a United Nations community."
"This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed," Maes told about 50 supporters who showed up at a campaign rally last week in Centennial.
Maes said in a later interview that he once thought the mayor's efforts to promote cycling and other environmental initiatives were harmless and well-meaning. Now he realizes "that's exactly the attitude they want you to have."
"This is bigger than it looks like on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms," Maes said.
Got that? Promoting radical ideas like riding a bicycle to work instead of driving your car is going to turn us into a bunch of "United Nations" communities, These under-the-radar socialists are attempting, in Maes's words, "to put the environment above citizens' rights."
Right you are, Mr. Maes. We definitely are going after your personal freedom and the political establishment's "rights" to serve as an accessory to degradation of the environment and promote the oil companies' exploitation of us, you asshole.
This 1941 map shows Seattle's comprehensive and efficient electric trolley system, later torn up at the behest of the automobile manufacturers of Detroit, the oil refiners of Oklahoma and Texas, and the rubber barons of Akron. It would be simple justice if all those streets were now converted to bike-and-pedestrian trails and closed to auto traffic.
The revolution won't be One Big Confrontation. Instead, it will take a thousand different forms, small, nonviolent underminings of the tyranny of institutionalized exploitation which has enslaved us gradually over the years, a little bit at a time.
In the words of David Crosby:
"Wooden ships on the water -- very free and easy...
Silver people on the shoreline, let us be...
We are leaving; you don't need us."
Click on the image for a larger view, then click again to embiggen even further.
2 comments:
He is also wrong, if I may. I reject enslavement to big cars, which are all that exist in the USA, really, and their high financial costs. Just try getting a repair that doesn't cost hundreds or thousands of dollars Or lots of time for do-it-yourselfers. Or forking over hundreds a month on car payments. It's indentured servitude.
Going into hock for a fancy SUV and an overpriced, badly-built house in a beige subdivision -- that's the ideal, or used to be. But now more and more people have figured out you might as well incarcerate yourself. It's about time.
"Personal freedoms" indeed.
DB
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