McSweeney’s bringing some hard truths with this one. We could all be doing better.
You forgot to go back in time and tell people that subsidizing the oil industry might be a bad idea.
When the oil and auto industries teamed up to bend public policy to their will, making a system of roads and parking lots that now function as a continuous subsidy and magnificent symbol of the normalization of injury and pollution, you had a lot of options. You could have objected. You could have shifted public opinion. Instead, you weren’t even born yet. And, rather than go back in time, all you’ve been doing is riding to get groceries and occasionally saying, “Please stop killing us.” On the effort scale? 1/10.
I’ve definitely run into my fair share of folks like that, and to a degree I think they infuriated me even more than just-car drivers, since they were making us cyclists look bad as a whole; giving reasons to motorists to hate us all. I totally hear you, and thank you for your thoughts that are right on, about the discrepancy in consequences