FIFTY SHADES OF CRIMSON

Ok, now that I have your undivided attention, this is not a soft porn women’s bodice-ripper tale. The subject under discussion here is not about that slightly kinky neighbor couple that otherwise live respectable public lives, and it is definitely not about anything that would titillate you sadosexually, masoerotically or even forensically. It has to do with ordinary people trying very hard to live through the events and circumstances of everyday life.

“How boring!” you say? Perhaps to someone used to encapsulating themselves in a five thousand pound, four wheeled road vehicle for that drive home from the office, but not to an individual like me who uses a bicycle to commute, for as it often turns out, more often than not it’s the ‘ordinary’ activities of life that suddenly present the most unanticipated peril and mortal danger.

An example for your consideration follows. In yesterday’s (local) paper appeared a brief article about an 89 year old man who apparently became caught up in a road-rage incident on a peaceful Saturday morning drive. It was about 9AM on a local highway, when the elderly driver ran afoul of a 33 year old man with anger problems.

Long story short, the younger individual followed the older man home and when that gentleman emerged from his garage, he was attacked by the younger man and beaten within an inch of his life. The news report used the words ‘kicked and stomped’ and the resulting severe injuries were determined to be ‘life threatening’.  Further, a neighbor who witnessed the brutal attack had tried to come to the older man’s defense and was also attacked and seriously injured. Finally, a third witness who was trying to call police on his cell phone was nearly run over by the attacker (deliberately, so says the article), who had meanwhile gotten back into his car and was attempting to drive off.

Fortunately, the attacker was shortly apprehended by police and remains in custody for a variety of charges that range from aggravated assault and ‘senior abuse’ to intended homicide. What is so disturbing about this incident, aside from the fact that a young man violently attacked an individual more than 50 years older than he, is the fact that such incidents are now almost a daily occurrence on this area’s streets and roadways. In my opinion it ranks right up there with the 25 year old who brutally raped an 82 year old woman a few weeks ago (yes, this actually took place in Sacramento) after breaking into her home.

The mental picture of some young, muscle-bound stud whaling the tar out of a man who’s nearing 90 years of age is both reprehensible and frightening, since it presages changes in our ever more variegated and ethnically diverse American society that reasoned social analysis tells us shall only continue to become more pronounced; but the particular incident cited here took place between two individuals in automobiles and my principal concern centers on motorist/bicycle antagonisms.

This past week I came about as close to something along the above lines as I have in a long, long time. I was about half way home from the office and it was late in the afternoon (about 4:15 PM) as I waited at a stoplight to cross a busy and admittedly hazardous intersection. The intersection in reference is a four way stop-light controlled juncture that services a large percentage of inner-city commuters who meet at the perpendicular apex of two very busy and congested avenues at this time of day.

To its credit, the city of Sacramento, despite increasing budget problems, has in recent years attempted to make the Capitol a more bicycle-friendly environment with the addition of additional bike-lanes and similar two-wheeled safety public works gestures. What hasn’t changed, however, is the attitude of many motorists who still firmly believe in the pragmatic imperative of might makes right on the roadway. That is to say ‘bigger is better’, ‘larger has priority’, and ‘bicyclists are second-class citizens’ when it comes to mixing two-wheeled and four-wheeled traffic together on urban streets.

After thirteen years of commuting by bicycle on this same drive, five days a week, I am prepared to admit that the vast majority of motorists I encounter each day en route are safe, considerate and careful to accord bicyclists their legal right to space and regard in the bicycle lane. Many of them actually pass by much further away from the bike lane than the nominal 3-foot legal clearance accorded to bicyclists by law (a habit that is always endearing to us two-wheelers), and although some persist in using the bicycle lane as a convenient right-side passing lane (when a car has stopped immediately ahead on the two lane street, attempting to turn left against oncoming traffic, and strictly illegally, of course), most do so only when there are no cyclists near.

That said, there are the occasional belligerent, self-absorbed (dare I say ‘immature’, puerile and clueless?) motorists who still regard bicyclists as pests and nuisances at best, and potential road-kill at worst. At the risk of stereotyping, it seems (based on my daily observation) that most of them drive larger-than-normal vehicles (read: pickups and SUVs) and seem to lack any real familiarity with the state traffic laws whatsoever. The fact that many of them are young males may or may not be incidental, but I’ve learned that expensive appearing vehicles with ‘black-out’ windows on all sides are best given lots of room, since the attempt to ‘hide’ from the observation of others that ‘black-out windows’ afford is reliably indicative of menacing potential for social antagonism and aggression in this (gang-ridden) part of the state.

Returning to my recent personal encounter with one of these miscreants, I was stopped at the stoplight, awaiting the green light to cross the intersection and continue south in the bike lane. To my immediate right, perpendicular to my path, was a right turn lane that allows east-west traffic to merge onto the south bound single lane, marked clearly by a large and conspicuous ‘YIELD’ sign. My previous experiences  with this admittedly potentially dangerous yield/merge juncture have shown time and time again that a good number of motorists either do not see the sign or fail to comprehend that ‘YIELD’ is not a bland encouragement, but rather an absolute mandate. I’ve seen a range of people from elderly individuals (suffering doubtless from the situational glaucoma effects of age) to plain old vanilla-flavored jerks of all ages who routinely ignore or otherwise blow-off that sign and pull right out to complete their right turn with total disregard for either cars or bicycles crossing south on the green light.

In the case of motorists it’s bad enough, since a collision is always an unhappy affair at best, no matter how slight or catastrophic, but for a cyclist caught like the cheese slice in a 'car sandwich' between a south bound vehicle and a right-turning vehicle the potential for a painful death is palpable to an extreme. Thin air and a scant layer of Lycra are hardly equal to the steel armor of a street-legal tank, after all.

My response, when this near-miss occurred, was instinctive and immediate. I glared at the other driver and growled at him (but said nothing profane, much to my credit) when he stopped at the last second, and then continued on my way. A few seconds later, he passed me on my left with an open window allowing his curses to reverberate loudly off the tombstones on the right side of the road (the Sacramento Municipal Cemetery adjoins this section of the south-bound Riverside Boulevard). Having justly earned some sort of equitable response on my part, I flipped him off appropriately. That gesture then provoked an attempt by him to brake and swerve into the bike lane I was in, and also threatening to stop and confront me.

Again a near miss, and I found myself reflexively wondering if this would result in one (or both) of us being taken into custody for aggravated assault, since in my maddened state of righteous indignation I likely would have met his challenge full-on, despite the ludicrousness of such a sight (a thin Lycra clad, aging cyclist confronting a nasty tempered ‘Green Hulk’). Of course, the possibility of being beaten and stomped to death, despite my spiritual resolve, also settled in on me in a heartbeat, since although I’m in great shape for a 66 year old, the other fellow was clearly in his early 30s and about as ‘corn-fed’ as you can get. The odds are just too overwhelming to take on in a face-off  like that, so prudence and good sense (something that blind fury had momentarily obfuscated in both of us) can’t be relied upon to serve as a safety release and in such circumstances only basic luck determines the ultimate outcome.

Fortunately for me, he didn’t stop and continued on his way after his half-hearted swerve to hit me, and I didn’t have the presence of mind to record and remember his license number, but the rest of the ride home flew by in a red haze as I berated this jerk for his careless disregard for cyclists (as well as my own inflated sense of perhaps misplaced personal rectitude). As a gauge of how intensely I reacted to this latest incident, the event took place almost a full week ago and I still find myself seething when I think about it.

Reviewing the above circumstances, I soberly realize that my jokey observation to my wife that “…getting home alive’ each day is the best part of my daily routine” is a bit more serious than it would seem on the surface of things, since someone who doesn’t share the mean streets on a bicycle with automobiles every day simply can't fathom the matter. Granmted that it makes me realize that I have simply been blessed with great luck thus far, with regard to having chosen to be a bicycle commuter.

In the past I’ve been asked more than a few times by others (non-bicyclists) upon learning that I commute to the office by bicycle: “Isn’t it dangerous riding a bicycle to work?”  Despite my best intentions to encourage others to try using two-wheeled transportation as a meaningful alternative to automobiles for short commutes, I invariably find myself answering a bit more frankly than I intend: “Hell YES, it’s dangerous!”.  It’s dangerous enough that I usually want to make it crystal clear to the inquirer that each day’s ride to and from the office is little more than a roll of the dice as to whether you will or will not encounter some homicidal jerk who (for whatever reason) has no compunctions about killing the next Lycra clad cyclist who gets in his cross-hairs, at the wrong moment and place.

At the age of 66 I am definitely feeling the acute vulnerability of my status more and more in the greater scheme of life, and the fact that another ‘older’ cyclist was shot to death in a similar encounter in this area a few years ago has never left my awareness, either. In his case, the murdered cyclist was an older former university professor who apparently shared my strong standards of ‘appropriate behavior on the road’. After being nearly driven off the road by a jerk in a pick-up, he had had the temerity to confront the driver of that vehicle at the next stoplight about his dangerous disregard for bicyclists. In response and without a word, the pick-up driver simply pulled out a gun (so we are told by witnesses) and calmly shot the sexagenarian cyclist dead as he stood there, perched indignantly astride his bike. That incident happened in nearby Folsom, not far from Sacramento, and my shock and outrage over that event fully equals the disgust I felt when I read about the 89 year old being nearly killed in the newspaper article referenced earlier.

Regrettably, we live in a society in which unchecked expression of rage still finds daily exercise but that’s just a fact of life immersed as we are within the politically correct morality that today passes for (and often replaces) justice in America. Violence and extreme social irresponsbility is almost a way of life in many parts of the nation. What is most reprehensible, of course, is the added insult of American style capitalism’s unhealthy (some would not mince words so effetely and say ‘perverse’) pandering to the youth culture that simultaneously elevates puerile, hormone ridden youthful angst to a high cultural plateau and reduces older members of society to being little more than conveniently exploitable consumers of geriatric health aids and medicines.

By encouraging the sort of youthful ‘just do it’ (the Nike Corporation’s infinitely abhorrent marketing slogan) mentality that champions the incompletely governed impulses and unreflective, reactive excess of unconstrained youth, our corporate powers that be not-so subtly encourage and strengthen youthful disregard for the value of life (not just older lives, but all life, unfortunately). And why is that, you might ask? Simply because there are gobs of money being made by clever marketeers who use youthful angst like a skilled Aikido practitioner uses an attacker's own force against him.

Thus we can thank those commercial forces that now effectively control and influence our culture through relentless daily media brainwashing (read: advertising) for most of this downward turn in regard for and appreciation of the softer, gentler qualities of our existence (such as love for the natural world, and the perhaps more androgenous aspects of our worldly existence). Youthful males (and now also youthful females, since they may also be equally exploited by commerce) are now encouraged to run wild and carve up life in their pursuit of thrills and stimulation, without regard for the consequences of unmindfulness that may synergistically accrue. For an apt parallel analogue, think of the armament salesman who provides small, warring African nations with powerful weaponry.

If that sounds like both an oral and figurative mouthful to you, read it this way: our own economic culture is most culpable for our continuing descent into the spiraling cesspool of commonality and banality that America has become. And no, religion won’t help save the world, not even an army of suspiciously Caucasian appearing Jesuses (who love you very much, we are assured), because our problem is attributable to intrinsic human biocerebral fallibility we have evolved and not to the mystical presence of some esoterically unprovable and impalpable fancifulness called ‘evil’. Sadly though, it’s a simple enough fact of reality that far more astute intellectuals like C. Wright Mills long ago called this fact out onto the analytical microscope slide, marking it for fundamental social culpability. There are no fast and easy cures, not surprisingly, for these irresponsible traits of our species’ numbingly unreflective bureaucratic infrastructures, either. As 50s cartoonist Walt Kelly called it, via an utterance by his character ‘Pogo Possom’, “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”

Looked at another way, absent all of my allegorical impugning and amateurish finger-pointing attempts at pseudo-eloquence, the jerks who commit acts of outrages such as those cited herein are (at the highest level of the process) the direct product of commercial and corporate pandering to the basest aspects of humanity. What is particularly sobering about this unhappy status quo is that only those in the uppermost positions of power and authority in our nation are aware of how disastrously our system systematically squeezes and sucks the life out of the mass consumer underclasses. Those who are actually part of the latter group (perhaps 90% of our entire nation’s population) have been so successfully massaged into thinking that our ‘American way of life’ is perfectly normal that they fail to understand that far from such a system constituting the apex of developed societies throughout the world, our cultural dreck populates the lowest level of Dante’s hell. How incredibly sad and disheartening that is to anyone who maintains a caring, reflective concern about life!

It goes without saying that bicyclists such as I (that is to say ‘mature’ and supposedly broadly aware individuals who habitually embrace the widest selection of prospects in life’s pawn shop) are fighting a lost cause if we expect the mindless pop-cultural illiterates of our culture to appreciate the nearly unlimited possibilities offered by alternate transportation modalities such as bicycling, since virtually every aspect of our culture reflexively regards us two-wheelers as fringie fruitcakes, marginal crackpots and sky-pie pilots. Even law enforcement typically manifests a built-in bias against cyclists, as minor encounters with these enforcers of domestic harmony prove day in and day out.

If, in the incident I referenced at the outset, an accident had occurred and there had been a collision, there’s no question in my mind that the officer taking the report would have pre-concluded in his own mind that regardless of the circumstances, the cyclist was at fault (since we all know that cyclists as a class are irresponsible, derelict in their sense of collective awareness and social rebels by nature, don’t we?). To cite the fact that, aside from occasional collective bureaucratic efforts to recognise the rights of cyclists (as long as recognitive token gestures don’t cost any significant sums of public revenue), cyclists are merely a powerless, unimportant and largely negligible underclass when compared to the vast, loudly outspoken armies of individuals solidly in the motor vehicle corner. And despite the erstwhile fable that America loves the underdog, the truth is that since words are so cheap in America (perhaps even cheaper than in any other nation in the world), no one really cares about an underdog unless that individual (or group) threatens to disrupt the status quo of the privileged classes enough to prompt the occasional toss of a distracting bone or two for it to chew on. It is as true today as it was in post-Czarist Russia. Believe it.

I’ll end this soon so as to spare you any further waste of your time with my personal gripes, but I am reminded of a cyclist I met a month or so back who is also a uniformed member of the city’s police force. Officer Sabrina (not her real name) was at the desk when I came in to discuss something one day and it soon emerged after a few exchanges that she was also a bicycle commuter who pedaled her way to and from the Freeport Police Station each day. It was interesting and vastly refreshing to meet someone like her, a fit, 30s’ish woman who doesn’t reflexively disregard and/or dismiss all cyclists as potential misanthropic anarchists, and it was clear from our conversation that she’d had more than a few incidents of the sort I describe here in the course of her own daily commute.

In the midst of that conversation, I couldn’t help but pause to muse over what might happen were she the bicyclist threatened by a motorist who had just blown through a ‘YIELD’ sign and proceeded to get belligerent about what he saw as a two-wheeled, irritating obstacle to his progress! It was a most self-satisfying and reassuring thought, regardless of any contrasting or contrapuntal strains of iconoclasmic force that otherwise arise, and for a few brief moments the underdog in me absolutely reveled in that mental image. Unfortunately, I don’t have a badge and weapon to put some teeth into the meaning of ‘respect’, but that’s probably just as well, since I’d much rather be a dead martyr than a convicted felon anyway, and at age 66, absolutely NOTHING could make me any more jaded, cynical and/or pessimistic than my 6 decades of life have already stamped into me.

Besides, bicyclists have long since been regarded as the dreck of society by those who are a bit less broadminded (or even unmindful, as in ‘ignorant’). Back in the late 1800s bicyclists were commonly regarded as being just a horseshoe throw short of being a radical group of social deviants, and old period images of 'Penny-Farthing' cycle clubs depict somewhat mystifying semi-martial rites and rituals, perhaps helping to strengthen that appearance. Cycle clubists in those old images are shown wearing what appear to be uniform-like apparel and are occasionally caught by the camera parading in military style formations through towns and cities, complete with banners and trumpets.

The reality behind that appearance is explained by the fact that random attacks on cyclists by the public were almost a routine and common event back in the late 1800s. Incidents in which cyclists were set upon by armed men brandishing everything from clubs to guns were so common as to be unremarkable, so much were bicyclists regarded by the public as an inherently disrupting element of society. One of the results of this on-going ‘open-season’ mentality that marked public attitudes towards cyclists in those days was  that cycle clubs quickly began to carry weapons in an equal effort to fend off attacks upon their members. The ‘martial’ qualities these old photos seem to capture were therefore to a large extent an accurate reflection of the blunt physical realities faced by those who embraced and promoted use of bicycles on streets and roads in those turn-of-the-century days!

Such tactics today, in our politically correct liberal society, would quickly result in one’s arrest for carrying a threatening weapon, let alone for overt use of one in an antagonistic encounter between a cyclist and a motorist. To this end, it doesn’t take much imagination to reaffirm the lamentable fact that the American system of jurisprudence (read: justice) serves to protect the guilty and assure them of their full constitutional rights, but does jack s**t to protect innocent, law-abiding citizens (read: potential victims) from depredatious criminal behavior.

Having myself given this rather perplexing and discouraging conundrum long and serious thought, I nowadays carry a ‘legal’ canister (no more than 2.5 ounces of the mixture) of 10% Oleocapsicum close at hand as a last-ditch defense against physical attack by an enraged motorist. Stashed in a pocket on my backpack’s shoulder straps where I can grab it quickly, I nevertheless sincerely hope I never have to use it, and have thus far admittedly been very, very fortunate in that regard. But regardless of how difficult it is to legally ‘defend’ yourself in politically correct California, I’ll be damned if I want to end up like that poor elderly gentleman who was just about beaten to death by a man a half-century younger than he.

The thought of things like that happening are shameful and discouraging to say the least and it really makes me eager to finally retire, once and for all, gather up the wifie and the pups, and head for a remote outback area somewhere where road-rage and gratuitous violence are less a way of life than they are in the Capitol of the nation’s largest (and most screwed-up) state!  I have about a year of work left and I am not being facetious when I say I hope I make it to that end point fully intact and in good health!

Be well and strive to treat your fellow human beings with the basic dignity and consideration they deserve, whenever possible, my friends. I’ll leave it up to you to decide about how to deal with the remainder who lie beyond that particular Pale, since as that old reworking of the traditional Christmas greeting has properly rendered it, “Peace on earth to all men of Good Will!”