Radical Patience | Snail Alert! | Massive Critique | From the Inside Out
Many of us attracted to radical politics are very impatient - with the larger society, but also with ourselves and especially with people who don't see how much better life could be if our radical visions were pursued. This impatience with the slow development of organic human communities, communities that might really be able to construct a different logic to our daily lives, often leads to childish and simplistic confrontational stances. These postures are much more about reassuring ourselves that we are truly radical and willing to face danger than they are about contesting the organisation of modern life.
If radical bicyclists are so hot to go on freeways, then instead of blocking traffic lanes why not wait for rush hour gridlock and then overwhelm the already stopped cars with dozens or hundreds of bicycles streaming through the traffic, departing the freeway at the next exit after a convincing demonstration of the ease, superiority and pleasure of bicycling? Imagine the surprise and support one might generate if such an intervention was carried out with courtesy and friendliness?
It is a terribly rash assumption that someone stuck in their car is necessarily a big supporter of the status quo. Consider instead the complexities of human choices and constraints and try to create openings in people's minds, rather than assuming that someone who hasn't adopted your choices about what to buy, how to get around, and lifestyles in general is your conscious enemy and deserves your moral condemnation, rage, or self-righteous taunting. It's not easy to proceed politically when we take seriously how difficult, deep and personal are the changes we seek. But pleasure, passion, and patience can bring real progress. Remember, the Americans [sic] you scorn today must be your allies tomorrow if you are serious about changing life!
During the last couple of Critical Masses a small clot of 30-40 people have been falling behind. Sometimes it's unavoidable to fall back but other times it seems that some kind of 'statement' is being made. Most cyclists here would readily agree that modern life is too rushed, and that we all ought to slow down a bit and enjoy ourselves. That's probably one of the commonest perspectives at a Critical Mass, and that's what we are doing while participating.
Nevertheless, excessive dawdling is hazardous.
Your friends are 'corking' at intersections to enhance everyone's safety. If they are good at it, they engage the nearby motorists and generally contribute to a celebratory spirit. When a gap of 1/4 to 3/4 of a block opens up and the corks are left holding up traffic for two or three (i.e. no bicycles) minutes, the entire relationship is blown and that person's safety is jeopardised. There are psychotics out there, folks, often sitting alone in their automobiles. Why not stick close together, make our many points en masse, and help keep the ride tight, coherent, and safe?
Something to consider: if a group of riders falls 'far enough' behind, the corks should BREAK THE MASS and let cross traffic flow on the green light. The Mass's front needs to stop occasionally anyway and let the density rebuild, so anyone left behind can catch up on the next pause. We are all going to feel really bad if someone gets hurt because the dawdling breaks up our strongest quality, our mass.
So much of our lives we are forced to accept situations which we have not chosen for ourselves. As consumers, as voters, as employees, we allow crucial decisions about our lives to be made by other, more powerful people. How sad it is then - and yet how predictable - that our movements for social change are so often cursed with this same problem. When we join a political party, or sign a petition, or take part in a rally, more often than not we are simply accepting someone else's opinion, chanting slogans we did not create, and endorsing laws we do not understand.
Critical Mass is, or should be, something different....A space where people do not have ideas or actions imposed on them, where people can take an active, rather than passive, role in building a livable future, in however small a way.
Because no one is in charge on our monthly ride, and no specific ideology is set forth, participants are free to invent their own reasons for being here. The lively Xerocracy that has sprung up, the preponderance of flags and hand-painted signs - not to mention the fact that Critical Mass is spreading to other cities - these things are all signs that we are doing something right. Unfortunately, not everyone sees things this way.
There are those who enjoy Critical Mass and regularly participate, but who criticise the ride for its formlessness and what is called its 'apolitical' nature. For these people, the task at hand is to politicise the ride by setting up some sort of steering committee, complete with chants, bullhorns and official security (in day-glo jackets, no doubt). If you listen carefully, you can hear talk of 'pulling in the reins', 'harnessing' the energy of Critical Mass in order to attain some worthy, though predetermined, political goal.
But who is the rider here? And who the proverbial horse? Not only are such analogies absurd and repulsive, but the approach is counter-productive, as those who have been to or heard of the over-organised but sparsely attended Santa Cruz ride can attest.
Another group who would seek to impose the stamp of their political ambitions on Critical Mass, and who have been to some extent more successful, are those who advocate an aggressive, antagonistic stance for the ride. Tactics along these lines have included surrounding and harrassing motorists who inch toward the Mass, baiting the police, and pedalling up to the front of the ride and abruptly turning off the agreed route in an attempt to 'hijack' the ride.
The purpose is presumably to 'radicalise' Critical Mass by pushing it in a more confrontational, even violent direction, an idea that recalls Chomsky's comment that tactics, in and of themselves, do not amount to radicalism.
What both of these approaches share is an impatience with the slow, painstaking task of educating others and organising toward a future worth living. A truly radical approach to the social problems we face would be to build community and to offer an alternative - a fact that apparently eludes those who believe people have to be tricked or stampeded into creating a better world.
Obviously, no one should be barred from expressing themselves or sharing their thoughts or opinions. We all want to see Critical Mass be a space where diverse political strategies can be debated and experimented with. The point is that if you want to see Critical Mass go in this or that direction, make copies of your ideas and pass them around. Only cowards and authoritarians shrink from the challenge of persuasion!
It could be that all we're doing is riding from HERE to THERE on bikes. But what is so amazing is that in attempting such a simple task, so many important and provocative questions come up. For a moment, a window is opened onto a possible future: a future where no one is in charge and most people ride a bike!
- from a handout distributed at the East Bay Critical Mass
Critical Mass began rather unassumingly, under a less catchy name, the Commute Clot. I went to a SF Bike Coalition meeting in August 1992 and suggested - since there were so many people on bikes downtown, and conditions where so infamously bad - that we gather once a month, make our presence felt to ourselves and the rest of the city, and ride home together. An enthusiastic response was followed within a few weeks by the SFBC's cautious disavowal of responsibility, but the idea caught on immediately. The first ride drew about 60 and after a full year it is drawing upwards of 600+ per ride.
The name Critical Mass came from Ted White's bike-umentary "Return of the Scorcher" wherein intersection crossing etiquette in China's big cities is discussed as a matter of Critical Mass: the cross traffic waits until it achieves critical mass and then pushes through, leaving the original stream of traffic to stop and build until it reaches its push-through point. Once a month we are a Critical Mass, filling 3-4 long blocks of San Francisco's Market Street at the tail end of rush hour, and pedalling in a free-expression zone temporarily free of engines and exhaust.
It was easy to organise CM because it's based on what people do already (bike commute along a main corridor), and its main declared purpose is to enjoy our presence and each other's company as we ride home together. It was also easy because without a specific agenda or organisational sponsor, no one had to actually agree with anything beyond a vague enthusiasm for bicycles, and that leaves room for a pretty wide range of people. Critical Mass has, in fact, brought a lot of new people into contact with each other. The basis for many other initiatives has already been laid, and the lived experience of a vibrant public life, at least for short times, has been tested by thousands of people.
Participation in an event without the usual trappings of monitors and organisers doesn't mean that there can be no preparation or safety measures. In fact these issues are just as important as ever, since the nature of the ride means it's very possible for someone to get hurt in a fall or in the worst case, by an irate psychotic in a car. In San Francisco we developed a few useful devices that help defuse bad moments and keep the ride moving along comfortably. In fact, the vast majority of people we pass give us thumbs up and friendly waves as they marvel at our procession.
Of course there is the occasional pissed-off macho car driver who manages to get the attention of one or more spoiling-for-a-fight-been-run-over-three-times-this-week bicyclists and before you know it things can get very out of hand. Luckily, cooler heads have always prevailed so far. On the April 1993 ride, a bad scene occurred at the back of the ride as it straggled up Market Street. Too few bicyclists were holding the intersections as the slowpokes made it through, after motorists had already been waiting for a while. An impatient man in an Audi pushed his way into the bikes, knocking one guy over. He got up and out of the way with his bike, basically unhurt. Then the driver lunged forward suddenly and smashed into Rebecca Seybold - she went flying, her bike under the wheels. The driver freaked out and tried to drive away, but Rebecca's bicycle jammed his steering and he got stuck in a long futile U-turn ending on the southwestern corner of Guerrero and Market. Meanwhile 20-30 bicyclists surrounded his car and as he drove away they began pounding on it with their locks, smashing a couple of windows. Rebecca's boyfriend John Kelly jumped through a broken window and grabbed the keys out of the ignition. The cops charged him with battery and Rebecca with malicious mischief, and characterised the motorist as the victim. On September 17, four months later, all the charges were dropped.
The East Bay Critical Mass ride, which takes place on the second Friday of each month, beginning at the downtown Berkeley BART station, took a somewhat different path. Without an obvious commute corridor like SF's Market Street, it became an unpredictable ride, careening around the East Bay, ultimately visiting the inside of a Safeway as well as a few McDonald'ses on its way to a rendezvous with the California Highway Patrol after a cruise down a couple of miles of Interstate 80 along the East Bay shore. Since the 63 arrests that day, a concerted effort has been made to calm the East Bay ride, and pursue a more long-term subversive strategy in the same vein as San Francisco's, downplaying the adolescent confrontations as much as possible. But the individual politics of the participants will always be heterogeneous, with militant punk anarchists and Clintonesque corporate workers riding side by side.
Pat Buchanan invoked a 'Culture War' during the last presidential campaign, and the past decades' confrontations between religious fundamentalism and secular liberal traditions is part of that. But the numerous alternative subcultures that flourish in San Francisco have their own agenda, outside of that war. When we ride along, several hundred strong, hooting and hollering, whistling, laughing and singing, past boutiques laden with furs and jewellery near Union Square, it feels like a coup, a clever tactical strike, in our kulturkampf. But our alternative culture has to go beyond mere moral guilt about excess consumption and really present a wholistic alternative involving the totality of daily life, from the work we do to how we get around and how we treat each other. Many of the pieces of that puzzle are already well developed but systematically thwarted by the way life is organised now. We know it can be very different, and when we're on the streets together we can feel it and see it.
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