That was utterly predictable and offensive. So I went to the editorial page.
And I found this.
The drive rears its ugly head. The website sucks, but that's by design.
Scroll past the self congratulatory puffery.
Incredible.
Lean thinking? Is that kind of like intellectual anorexia?
Who the hell is Kathy Sibbel?
Is there any doubt that the Strib is in Pawlenty's pocket?
--Loosestrife
On the Streets, in a Parallel Universe
2 Comments Published by Loosestrife on Saturday, October 06, 2007 at 11:50 PM.
Now we know who's in charge of Minneapolis streets. It's a tightly organized group of serial lawbreakers called marathoners. This Sunday, 10,500 will take over city thoroughfares, breaking traffic laws with impunity while police stand by and watch.
Every year, the Twin Cities Marathon runners disrupt a beautiful fall Sunday morning. Some insist the run is "Just for the challenge." Others acknowledge a political agenda: they want to enlighten the rest of us -- greedy overweight slackers that we are -- about the joys of running until it hurts.
The Marathon mob has chosen a strange way to promote its agenda. The Twin Cities Marathon philosophy is to infringe on others' rights by disrupting traffic and ignoring red lights.
They block traffic by "law enforcement" -- our Minneapolis police block off intersections for these health nuts creating a virtual Berlin Wall keeping motorists from their rightful place on our city streets.
Are you rushing to get to church?
Out to buy some Sunday morning bagels?
Want to enjoy a leisurely fall color drive on the parkways?
The Twin Cities Marathon doesn't give a rip. Tough luck for you, Mac, because you're a tub o' lard and I am enviably disciplined.
Why are Minneapolis police condoning this lawbreaking? Because the guy upstairs does. Mayor R.T. Rybak promoted himself in his first mayoral campaign as a runner and has even run a marathon or two I guess. He even proudly declares that he invented the Loppet, a ill advised cross county ski event for which Minneapolis never has enough snow, an event that serves to inconvenience city residents--marathoning for winter sports nuts.
Initially, it's hard to reconcile Twin Cities Marathon runners' lofty pro-health rhetoric with their inhuman practices and elitist bearing.
But maybe The Twin Cities Marathon is just the latest permutation of a phenomenon we've seen for almost three decades. Though the run attracts a variety of participants, they are, by definition, people who choose to define themselves through moral superiority, privilege, and self obsession--driving a multi-million dollar industry of over-priced useless specialty clothing.
The 70's and the 80's brought a sea change. For the middle- and upper-class young people, it was the modern running shoe that brought them out into the streets wearing synthetic fabric and served as their vehicle for self-assertion -- the "politics of personal expression." Middle-class kids wore their sports clothing as a badge of honor, as a symbol of their health and vigor. There had always been jocks, but now running became a status symbol--and marathoning became the original X-Treme Sport--individualistic and dangerous and not about sport really but self-indulgence.
Despite their noble sounding motives, marathoners are extremists who are really about perversity: promoting their sickness in a hateful display of their obsessive pursuit of the runner's high, the point at which natural opiates called endorphins "kick in" to give runners an effect comparable to heroin. Who needs poppies when the cops protect your drug habit?
Don't you think they're sending us a message by picking Sunday mornings to block our streets so that they can pursue intoxication? They could go out to a rural area where they can run unimpeded without disrupting church going city residents. But that won't do. Their antics are more about power -- "I'll make you wait while I run by" -- and self-dramatization than making the world a better place.
Minneapolis authorities eventually will discover what jailers learn when they allow petulant convicts to dictate their need for exercise and recreation. You don't get improvements in behavior. You just open the door to bigger trouble.
