Perspective: The Mass

Critical Mass is simply a monthly bike ride, a gentle saunter through the streets, usually around traffic hour. At the same time, it's an organic mass movement; it brings up to thousands of cyclists together in various cities throughout the United States, generally without any central organization whatsoever. Because of the sheer immensity of its ridership, its significance and objectives to each individual rider are vastly different. In every case, however, its purview is largely sociocultural, and every well-informed participant can agree, at the very least, that we ride to show an increasingly hegemonic car culture that bicycles fare just fine on the streets, too.

Critical Mass San Diego

Most ride for fun, to connect with the cycling culture and community, to meet people, to celebrate a collective experience, to witness the urban landscape in a way that's only available twelve days out of the year. Many people ride to take a militant stand against unsafe and inconsiderate motorists. Either way, as much of a nuisance as we make ourselves (because, for unity's sake, we do "cork" intersections to keep the mass flowing through lights that have turned red), we are come and gone through each intersection in a matter of minutes, on and off the streets in a matter of hours. I believe that Critical Mass has extraordinary potential to bring the inadequacies of traffic law to the surface of the public consciousness, and that it should use that potential to make corking legal (not only is it safer, but some cyclists feel better breaking many laws when they feel the law at large does not protect them). My personal convictions aside, however, any seasoned rider knows that it can shed light on the injustices of our ethically crippled system of law enforcement.

At a Critical Mass ride in San Diego five weeks ago, the SDPD followed the Mass around with at least a dozen squad cars and a helicopter, and even arrested two cyclists for minor infractions that easily warranted no more than a ticket. At this point, whether or not these cyclists broke the letter of law is completely irrelevant; it's clear that the police department felt a responsibility to "contain" the ride and, unable to take legitimate punitive recourse against the crowd at large, employed fear tactics and made an egregious example of two cyclists who did just as much (and just as little) as anyone else. The question now is about why we're allowing the city to spend our tax dollars following around a friendly bike ride and turning a public annoyance into a carnival of power abuse, especially when the City of San Diego is effectively broke and we have so many other, more salient issues to deal with. For the record, the two arrested cyclists did nothing more than cross a double-yellow (or exit the bike lane, which happens to be legal) to pass other cyclists in the complete absence of cross-traffic.

I know that San Diego is an unusually conservative city for Southern California, but I felt that the local paper's treatment of the issue was tragically one-sided, and so I hand-wrote a letter to the editor, the text of which follows.

Police Brutality Caught on Camera

Dear Karin E. Winner,

I am a UCSD student and loyal reader of the Union-Tribune. I have come to rely on your paper for quality journalism on salient, local issues.

Imagine my disappointment, though, when I came across this piece on page B4 of today's issue. Critical Mass may not deserve more than 150 words in the local paper yet; it attracts only a few hundred participants per month, albeit entirely without central organization. It does, however, deserve as balanced a perspective as any other issue. Of the hundreds of cyclists in attendance, not a single one, it seems, had been asked to comment.

If we had, the article might have made some mention of how one of the officers--the one who conducted the first arrest--refused to give his badge number after being asked repeatedly, and how he openly lied to the group, telling us that arrested cyclist would only be ticketed, then sent on his way, all while this poor fellow sat helpless in the back of the squad car.

I know I can continue to rely on the Union-Tribune for its journalistic integrity, even in spite of this egregious lapse. I only hope that, as Critical Mass continues to grow in the following months, the Union-Tribune will give it the investigative attention it deserves (at least a much as "Texas Woman finds chupacabra; or was it a dog?" A2), and that as a valuable local media outlet, you will lend your voice to the disenfranchised, victimized layman rather than a few police officers whose adherence to protocol was questionable at best.

Yours Truly,
Ryan Lue

Okay, so a letter's not going to do much, but it's really the best I had for all my outlet-less frustration. And these arrests aren't the problem; they're the symptom of a broken political, cultural, and economic system that tolerates nonconformity only where it makes no real difference. It's time we mobilized--not just cyclists, but all citizens; not just about CM, but about everything that's wrong with our beloved country--because a superficial sense of social harmony isn't worth ceding our civil liberties to a police state, nor our political agency to a secretive and corrupt Administration. We've already seen this generation's Vietnam; we shouldn't have to wait around for another Kent State.