Back in high school, I had a friend who, while driving home from her boyfriend’s place on some dark, dank, country road around dusk one night, made a left turn onto a side road. 

Through inexperience, bad luck, poor road design or the glare of the sunset, she didn’t see the truck barrelling up the road straight at her as she made the turn.  She was killed instantly – about as instantly as it gets, as luck’d have it, not that that made her parents feel any better.

Was she “stupid?”  Unlucky?  Did she guess wrong, or just plain miss the oncoming truck?  We don’t know.  The driver was never cited, and no fault was ever really ascertained as I recall because, really, did it matter anymore?

Question:  Is it a good thing she never got to “breed?”

The tragedy hit me hard back then.  And since I’ve had kids of my own, I’m even more keenly aware of how fragile life is.  Bad things happen – frequently to people whose only “stupidity” is being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And when those bad things happen, someone – a father, some kids, a girlfriend – get left behind.

I haven’t laughed about an accident, even a genuinely stupid one, since I had kids.

———-

I digress.  But not really.

I’ve never really understood “conservatives'” antipathy toward bikers – and by “bikers”, I mean people who ride bikes.  Lots of conservatives ride.  I ride a lot from the beginning of April until it gets just too cold; it’s my main commute to work, and it’s one of my favorite weekend diversions, when weather permits. 

Leaving aside that it’s a lot of fun, and it’s just about the best outdoor cardio exercise there is, especially for people who are past their mid-twenties and have the knees to show for it, there are a lot of good free market reasons to bike.  It’s inexpensive.  It saves you money on gas, maintenance, healthcare and taxes, since we’re cutting out miles of government gas taxes as we ride. 

Some, like Jason Lewis, complain wrongly that we are getting a free ride.  Its untrue of course; gas taxes go mostly to highways, and most biking is done on city streets.  Which we pay through various city taxes, including property taxes, which I assure you I most definitely pay.  Indeed, given that all other things being equal we pay the same city/county taxes as everyone else, and inflict vastly less wear and tear on the roads than our car-driving neighbors, it’s not unreasonable to say that all other things being equal we pay more taxes on the applicable roads than the rest of you (and that ignored the fact that most of us drive as well).

So it’s all you motorized freeloaders who need to step lightly around the rest of us.

And yes, I know – bikes are identified with a lot of lefty excesses; smug greenies wave their bikes in the rest of society’s faces with gay abandon.  “Critical Mass” has turned into an excercise in group arrogance, and would be well dispensed with.

But the fact is, a bike – like a gun – is nothing more than a tool.  It’s the rider that counts.

———-

At any rate, a rider was killed yesterday morning in Minneapolis.  By a turning semi.  While riding (the nerve of the guy) in a dedicated bike lane.

Stuff happens.  Sometimes the accidents come to you.  Urban biking requires immense care; experienced city bikers have eyes on the backs of their heads, and are not the ones you see riding around with IPods stuck in their ears.  The old drill sergeant aphorism is true; anything you do can kill you, and anything you don’t do can kill you.  When you’re a city biker, you are always one missed signal, one inattentive driver, one moron in a Jeep trying to reset his CD player or groping for a cell phone, one overly-wide turn, away from being a grease stain; you are only as safe as the sum of the dumbest driver around you and the speed of your own reflexes allow you to be.  If you’re smart, you ride very defensively, avoiding dangerous streets (I cringe as I drive down University or Snelling watching people trying to ride in traffic), and places with particularly dangerous traffic.

Especially semis. 

Tracy Eberly at the short-for-this-world Anti-Strib quoted the Strib article on the accident verbatim, adding only two editorial elements of his own; the title (“Weeding Out The Stupid“) and the tag (“I Hope He Didn’t Breed”).  The victim, unfortunately, was named Donald Dumm.  I know nothing about the late Mr. Dumm – his background, his experience at city biking, his knowledge of his route, and least of all his politics.  I don’t know if he was riding carefully or not (he was in a bike lane), or whether he took a dumb chance.

I do know, though, that when Tony Snow – former talk show host, White House spokesman and all-around class act – died of cancer a few years ago, a horde of suet-brained leftybloggers partied like it was 1999, acting as if Hitler or, worse, Cheney himself had passed, and drawing glee from it.  And I ripped on them for being, really, inhuman.

Leftyblogger and biker Charlie Quimby – who’s never been mistaken for a drooling Kossack – responded to Tracy yesterday.

Tracy is being extremely stupid and insensitive, but I don’t think he deserves to die for it.

Don’t know if I’ll go word for word with Charlie, but in for a penny, in for a pound; Mr. Dumm had friends, a family, a life, and his death – through circumstances that look to have been the kind of sudden, uncontrollable crisis that kills thousands of car drivers a year who pass without the benefit of anyone grabbing a cheap chuckle at their death – isn’t the stuff of cheap comedy.

Especially political comedy.

Especially political comedy that is just plain wrong.

Look – I’ve defended Anti-Strib when nobody else would; during the “Dirt Worshipping Heathens” fracas, I took Tracy’s side against drooling crank Karl Bremer and the bought-and-paid-for Steve Perry and their horde of anonymous, lead-paint-chip guzzling leftyblog droogs.  And I’d do it again.  Because, more often than not, Tracy’s right.

But one of the most important tenets of conservatism is that of the worth of the individual, as opposed to the class, label or group.  When we start focusing on group labels – “Bushie” or “Cyclist” or “wingnut” or whatever – over individuals, we lose.  We become like “the enemy”. 

And it wouldn’t matter if Dennis Dumm, God rest his soul, were an ACORN worker who was singing “The Internationale” and smacked into the truck because he was laughing at that funny “Somewhere in Texas, a Village is missing an Idiot” bumpersticker yet again. 

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Biking, Conservatism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.