Thousands Join N.Y.C. Bike Protests [Archive]

slowpoke

07-02-2020, 11:30 AM

There was also this piece from last month: The Bicycle as a Vehicle of Protest (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-bicycle-as-a-vehicle-of-protest) by Jody Rosen

There is a long record of bicyclists engaging in protest, and of authoritarian governments cracking down on bicyclists. One of Adolf Hitler’s first acts upon assuming power, in 1933, was to criminalize cycling unions, which were associated with anti-Nazi political parties. Brown Shirts were sent to villages to confiscate bikes, a practice that was repeated years later by German soldiers during the occupations of Denmark, the Netherlands, France, and other countries. Then there are the famous scenes, from 1989, of pro-democracy demonstrators in China pouring into Tiananmen Square on bicycles, and the macabre images of flattened frames and wheels that were left behind after tanks moved in to crush the revolt.

These regimes recognized the bicycle for what it is: an emblem of freedom. The invention of the bicycle was the realization of an ancient dream. It was the elusive personal-transport device, a contraption that liberated humans from their dependency on draft animals, allowing individuals to move swiftly across land under their own power. Long after its primacy was usurped by the automobile, the bicycle retained a unique appeal. It was a cheap, durable, versatile, compact, lithe little machine, capable of whisking a rider across town through chockablock traffic, or transporting that rider out of the gridlocked city altogether, over the hills and far away. A bike could carry you five or ten or two hundred miles; when you got home, you could carry the bike into your apartment. To an authoritarian government or an occupying army, the bicycle was a menace, a tool of resistance that could be used by dissenters to sneak up and speed off, to organize and mobilize and elude.