I’m for law and order, the way that it should be
This song’s about the night they spent protecting you from me
Someone called us outlaws in some ol’ magazine
New York sent a posse down like ain’t never seen
Don’t ya’ll think this outlaw bit’s done got outta hand?
– W. Jennings
I haven’t had a car for 14 years. I lived in California most of that time, half of that time in the Bay Area. West of the Mississippi it’s one of the few places that has an actually viable public transit system. I don’t have anything metaphysically against cars, in fact, I find them an amazing technology, but our oil addiction is problem one in America. It is an addiction where each fix becomes more expensive, the high less rewarding, and it is destroying the life of this republic.
I’ve been in LA for two years more or less, the weather’s nice anyway, but it’s a rotten place to not have a car. Biking in LA is a bit of death sport. Hey, death sports can have their excitement, but there’s more interesting ones than dodging cars on a bike in LA. Drivers have no respect for bikers. A place that should actually have plenty of biking as transport options, basically has none.
So, it just steamed me to get pulled over by police the other night, on my bike, on my way home from an evening with a friend. I was pulled over on Pico Blvd, having imbibed a few libations, but not under the influence. Cop car pulls in front of me, flashes lights, and blocks the curb. My first thought, “No way, oh baby, you aren’t pulling me over on my bike!”
Two officers out of car. One stands by side, one approaches me asking, “Are you carrying anything you shouldn’t have?”
“No.”
“Can I search you?”
“No.”
“Put your hands behind your back and hold them together,” says the officer. Which I do and he proceeds to search me, but doesn’t remove anything from my pockets. He then asks for my license, which I give him. He then asks me to sit on the curb with my legs open and palms up on my knees, sort of mutated lotus position, in front of the squad car, with search light blazing directly on my face, call it showing power.
He calls in my license and proceeds to ask a series of question, phone social security number, etc, which I answer. If you challenge police authority, you have to be prepared to go to jail and need a good lawyer, because that’s where challenges are eventually resolved, not on the street. After about ten minutes, I’m let go, “Get a light.” Yeah ok, but that’s some deal to tell someone to get a light.
I was told by a friend that I was gang profiled, “Half my students have.” Hmm, must have been all the gray hair? Or yeah, it was the bike. Because when you’re riding your bike in LA, you might as well be an outlaw. Biking is a lonesome endeavor in LA. The few who do ride, many ride on the sidewalks, which are wide and almost always empty of pedestrians, and really the only place to ride your bike without some knucklehead shooting by at fifty-miles an hour, about six inches from you, and another six inches between you and the parked car on the other side. Like I said, death sport. A few months ago, a friend of mine, only 24, was taken out by an Escalade. With two shattered hips, shattered knee, and broken ribs, she’s spent two months in bed, and is now hobbling around on crutches. When two wheels meet four wheels, there’s only one outcome.
There’s over thirty thousand car fatalities a year in the United States. Yet, no one gets scared getting in their car. If you look from a decade’s perspective, one-hundred times more Americans have been killed by cars, than terror attacks. But with a combination of terror fright and our increasingly inequitable wealth distribution, we’re giving our police more and more power, and in the last decade, with disregard for Posse Comitatus, we are letting our military get involved in police affairs, history shows no more dangerous malignancy for a republic. We should be spending a lot more money on good public transit, walking communities, and biking infrastructure, than police and prisons. Want to be a good citizen? Get a bike, and use it some time.
Archein