minneapolis upside down

A new snapshot of U.S. urban economies shows the Twin Cities under a cloud. But it's a picture taken from a distance.

. . . so goes the first paragraph from a short Mike Meyer's article in the Strib posted last night.

Elsewhere, we learn that "two of every three" urban areas "performed better than Minneapolis, St. Paul and Bloomington in 2005."

Any elected officials care to comment?

Got to love that "But it's a picture taken from a distance" line.

Yeah, we in the Twin Cities know that every day and in every way things are getting better and better.

--Loosestrife

It's been a rough couple of months for two wheelers.

Even lawyers and Nick Coleman have noticed that the streets aren't exactly hospitable to bicyclists. Truly, if you ride with any regularity, you know that there are enemies in automobiles who will fuck with you for sport--or out of ignorance or negligence. They come in all shapes, sizes, and colors.

I don't bike to work as often as I would hope to (every day), but when I do, I have been threatened with physical harm, been told to get off the road, have had drivers (laying on their horn) run up on my ass, and have had cell phoning drivers edge into the bike lane on Park Avenue, pushing me towards a deleterious wipe out.

I haven't been been beat around the head or killed yet, but if I lay dying next to my bicycle at some point, I won't be thinking "Wow, how could this have happened?"

But I may lay there thinking of that bitch, Katherine Kersten, who damn near called for a fatwa against us in her absurd column on September 5th. Kersten, pissed off because her auto commute was delayed by Critical Mass, claims to be spoiling for a fight. To her suburban motoring ass I say, in the words of her esteemed spiritual leader, "Bring it on."

Any charges filed against the the bus driver who killed Adam Finley?

Nick Coleman's eyes have apparently been opened. He wrote a column about a mild mannered bicyclist who now understands Critical Mass after almost being another casualty . Oh yeah, the driver was not charged--even though the cop on the scene found "that driver inattention and failure to yield had 'contributed' to the accident."

When Finley was killed over by Lake Calhoun, bicyclists I know talked about it in hushed tones as they contemplated how close each of us have come to being wiped out by "driver inattention."

*********************
It is debatable how much Mark Loesch's murder in south Minneapolis had to do with his being a bicyclist. To be honest, I find this story to be incomplete at this point. We could always learn that he was beaten because he pissed off a motorist who trailed him, assaulted him, and simply drove off.

Regardless, I was disheartened to see the block where he died littered with "50 More Cops" signs in the days after his memorial.

This law and order "movement" for a police surge is a contrived stunt by Republicans and Independence party hacks to get some attention. They should be ashamed to use the tragic death of Loesch as a spring board to improve their ill-fated political fortunes in Minneapolis.

A surge of 50 cops in Minneapolis will be no more successful than the surge of troops in Baghdad, resulting in a momentary improvement at best while underlying issues remain unaddressed.

I understand the fear and anger of the people on the 3700 block of Eliot, but surely there is a mighty irony in calling for more cops when the brutes in blue assaulted Critical Mass riders less than two weeks before Loesch was beat to death.

And surely there was irony, too, in a largely white group marching straight outta Kingfield neighborhood into the mixed race community of Powderhorn to express their righteous anger while political conservatives make hay out of this sad story.

*****************
Whatever we learn about Loesch's murder, Adam Finley is just as dead, as is every bicyclist killed by a distracted or unobservant motorist.

Unfortunately, for the bicyclist on the road, Kersten and far too many motorists look at us a interlopers at best, terrorists as worse--not as victims of carnage, but as collateral damage in the battle for traffic freedom.

To me that is what Critical Mass should be about, letting everyone know that we bicyclists are here and have rights on the road.

Had Loesch been run over by a cell phone wielding driver at 38th and Chicago, I doubt that killer would be charged with murder.

I wonder if he or she would have even got a ticket.

--Loosestrife

I've been reading The World Without Us . It's one of those books that, as you read Alan Weisman's well-crafted prose, softens and crumbles the limits of your own thinking as you consider the "permanent" human built structures that erode rapidly without the constant maintenance of human labor.

One of the heavy thoughts driven into your frontal lobes by this book is that homo sapiens--and our humanoid cousins and ancestors--are inherently genocidal, incapable of limiting destructive behaviors. So much so in fact, that we routinely slaughter our own species, so much so, that our own fate as a species may be suicidal.

Forced to go beyond the individualism so soaked into one's grey matter, beyond one's own death, Weisman's reader confronts, ironically, the question of how to live in a nation where his or her fellow humans seem hell bent on living as if nothing matters except acquisition and domination. So, before we even take our leave from the planet, we already are leaving our edifices untended. Better stay off the bridges.

**********
And the mute inexorable physical forces of our home planet slowly but surely tear down things like bridges--and our own intellectual limitations sometimes hasten our edifices' demise. And we build unstable crap, because there is money to be made this year, month, week or day. These are all lessons to be learned from The World Without Us, which posits a world where human kind cease to exist. Don't believe it? Listen to this, wherein Mark Serreze, senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado describes the "fast track of change," a world where the arctic ice cap disappears totally in summer.

The lesson of the 35W bridge collapse is, in part, that our species' arrogance leads to disaster. On a global scale, it may mean our species' arrogance may lead to our extinction, a outcome not necessarily bad for life on earth.

I'm not rooting for human extinction, a point where I diverge from the most extreme of environmentalists, though I understand their point of view.

Today, however, as I contemplate Amy Klobuchar's vote to condemn Move On Dot Org for opposing an absurd grandstanding performance of an "ass kissing chicken shit" I am truly tempted to throw in the towel and just become the heroin addict that I have alway aspired to be, thank you Afghanistan (and Lou Reed).

Tomorrow is another day?

--Loosestrife

Late Wednesday night, Matthew Gretz, husband of Kira Simonian was arrested. He will likely be charged today for Kira's murder.

That's not a surprise to me.

Gretz's attorney, Ron Meshbesher indicated that Gretz maintains that he is innocent. Police say that their case is solid.

The media is all over this now, so this will be my last post on Kira Simonian's murder until there is a good reason to comment.

But I want to say in closing that beyond any other issue that may emerge in the legal machinations that will now start, this is part of the long sad story of violence against women--a story that we all accept too willingly since it is so frighteningly common, even routine.

--Loosestrife