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8 Sweet & Simple Sentences  On Bicycling

Using a bicycle for running one's daily errands (not for daytime only RACING or RECREATION as most bicycle retailers cater to)  is a form of continuing adult education in concepts of LIVING LIGHTLY ON THE EARTH.  Auto-oriented bike shops seem to be the rule in the USA today, where it's presumed you have a car that you need to outfit to carry your bike;  but outfitting your bike with simple cargo capacity is almost unheard of in the USA.

Each bicycle ride is a lesson in simplicity, modesty, flexibility, trust, patience, exercise, physical and mental health, respect for nature and the natural world, as well as respect for one's natural limits and particularly respect for the other living creatures inhabiting this planet and one's own bloodstream.

Cars, SUV's, bicycling prohibited highways, and especially single occupancy vehicles (S.O.V.'s) are essentially the opposite of all these things.  Yet the streets of the USA are swarming with SOB’s in SUV’s from HEL’s (home equity loans).

SOV's are all about I, me, mine; bikes are all about us, we, them. Getting along with and anticipating pedestrians, wheelchair riders, trucks, children, cats, dogs, even bugs and frogs, are what makes a safe biker who makes it home with a smile. Whereas in a car or truck, it's mostly a matter of cleaning the blood and other dead creatures off the bumper and windshield once in a while.

P.S. "What one does not trouble to find within will not be discovered by transporting the body hither and yon." --Paramhansa Yogananada

Please Stop Killing The Children Pt. 1

Perhaps few of you know there are only two countries in the UN that have refused to sign the UN convention on the rights of the child. One of them is Somolia, the other is the United States. This has been true for years, and I recently checked that the info is still accurate.

It's amazing to me the number of ways children's health is compromised, and their cancer risk maximized, by our fossil fooled America, and the extreme forms this takes in rubber-wheeled California.

Recent studies show deisel soot particultes cause not only lung cancer but also especially in those below 30, brain tumors and cancer! Here are some links to read it and weep:

http://www.aqmd.gov/news1/MATES_II_results.htm
http://www.aqmd.gov/matesiidf/matestoc.htm

I'm also providing you a link for South Coast AQMD's staff directory:

http://www.aqmd.gov/aqmd/intraqmd.html#phone

We live in a state and time where piles of old rubber tires become so huge as to be called a mountain, where internal heat from the heap causes it to self ignite, and the crews that put out the oil well fires in Kuwait get called in to contain it; headlines in California, July 1997 or 8. Even those special teams did not claim with certainty they could contain it, and proposals to just let the old tires burn themselves out were taken as the likely approach.

Thank you, busses of Alameda/Contra Costa County Transit for your contribution to this mess. Your plan to withold desperately needed light rail for the East Bay, for another 20 years of diesels, should be shredded immediately due to the new reports linking diesel soot to children's athsma and twentysomething's brain cancers.

Recycling rubber is yet another issue; children are now routinely exposed to massive styrene emissions (it's what rubber exudes from the day its made - now from petroleum, not rubber trees) as the play mats under playground equipment and surrounding most any K-12 school facility dose them with styrene quite handily. It saves the school district the cost of a gardener's paycheck I guess, no need for grass, just old tires in the form of black rubber mats. The Frog Creek playground for kids in my North Oakland neighborhood is a good example - plastic lumber for almost everything, and the "playground" directly showered with toxins from the roaring highway 24 overpass it's all built almost directly underneath. Too bad styrene emissions combine with a deadly synergy to exponentially multiply the toxic risk, when the styrene is combined with diesel bus and truck emissions. CBS News' 60 minutes recently reported the problem that after about 10 years, when the styrene has evaporated from the rubber, rubber tires become brittle and can explode catastrophically even if they have as much tread as when new. There has been an appropriate call for expiration dates on tires, and in fact there are manufacturer's codes on the INSIDE (i.e., under the car side) of the tires, but these codes need translating by the manufacturers, presumably via their websites. Also one of the best auto-related websites is www.autosafety.org, operated by the Center for Auto Safety in Washington, DC. There you can find recall/defect/secret warranty info on all makes of cars, along with info or links to tire problems/recalls. There are actually plenty of folks like me, who own a car and do not use it much. My most crucial tire exploded in a place on Hiway 17 called blood alley, on my way to Earth Day in Santa Cruz, April 2003. Luckily I lived to tell about it, and a to tell a few other things like this.

Twentysomethings also become victims quickly of extremely high insurance rates and heinous crippling or killing auto accidents, because they are often given hand me down cars lacking such luxuries as brakes, signals, lights, air bags, or even well designed seat belts. The insurance industry alleges kids are bad drivers without acknowledging they are trying to operate cars that affirmatively handicap safety and work against any driver regardless of age. This is a nasty form of age discrimination. Parents understandably have a way of keeping the modern, safe car for themselves when they give their kid a car that works against safety reliably. Getting junk cars that run off the streets entirely is another subject no one wants to discuss, although in Southern California programs exist to help owners of such old unsafe gross polluting cars to "cash them out" by purchase programs run by the Air Quality Management district. According to Amory Lovins (surf his Rocky Mountain Institute website, rmi.org) about three fifths of the USA's air pollution puffs and spurts from the dirtiest, oldest one fifth of our cars.

This is too much for one blog so I call it quits for now and hop on the bicycle to work off my angst, and keep the circulation to my head going strong. Best to each of you and pray for a society that honors its kids with safe and clean and green playgrounds, as well as safe and convenient transit that reduces the pathetic pattern of every kid trying to have and drive a hand me down car. /FONT> Show savvy and flexibility in your travel plans, and remember to root for bike routes!

jimisfun@mac.com


"Flexible People are Disciples of Life." - Lao Tzu

Please Stop Killing The Children Pt. 2

ABC's evening national news, Friday, February 6, 2004:

The United States has 53,285,336 children.

Among these kids, in the last year counted:

6001 died in motor vehicle accidents.
1109 deaths from drownings
586 were killed by fires and burns
45 were murdered in the course of 115 abductions per year; this is a total of less than ONE child murdered by abduction, per STATE, with 120 times that number killed per state by motor vehicle per year.

These statistics, if one can trust ABC news team sources, would seem to indicate that there is a slight overemphasis on, and news reporting of, child abductions.
It startles me that the statistics on abductions are so low, given the looks of milk cartons and especially local newscasts in this country.

(Auto accidents have killed more than twice as many people in the US as have been killed in all the wars in US history.)*

However, it's crucial to realize that those newscasts are brought to us by the likes primarily of General Motors, Ford, Lexus, VW, Toyota, Honda, Exxon, Shell, Midas, AAMCO, ad nauseum. Stories of childhood abductions make for sensational news, yet blood on car bumpers and pavement is so common as to be deemed not newsworthy, unless the numbers on any given accident are particularly high.
Children are prevented from getting healthy exercise outdoors as parents are traumatized and frozen by these damn sensational newscasts. The children end up hopelessly obese and needing glasses from playing constantly with indoor only video games but the parent then feels comfortable that the child is "safe" indoors.

It's interesting to note the sales of video and computer games now gross more revenue than all hollywood movie box office reciepts.

I'm not sure where the notion of entitlement to feel comfortable at all times comes from, but it has nothing to do with the real world. A week ago today, I had a healthy looking young woman over to my Baja Rockridge residence announce flatly that although she's taken personal security training, there isn't a single neighborhood in the entire half a million citizen city of Oakland (which has some fabulous high brow neighborhoods) where she would feel comfortable walking three blocks. Where DOES this implied entitlement to feel 100% comfortable 100% of the time come from? It is surely part of the obesity crisis that is making the US the laughing stock of public health officials all over the world.

Attacks on children for the things adults do tend to rub me the wrong way. Wilma Chan, my assemblyperson, made a splash of big news last week by introducing a bill to punish the child operators of those hideous, noisy, highly polluting two-stroke engined motorized scooters a total of two children have been killed by in California last year. Apparently her proposals are strictly a matter of fining and regulating the kids, there was no suggestion in the newscasts of a simple ban on such ridiculously bad and dangerous motor vehicles that are incapable of even reaching speeds similar to those of a bicycle, the scooters top out at about 20-25 mph on level ground.

While I applaud Chan's efforts and particularly the punishments for the kid's tendency to show off their power by deliberately sabotaging the already trivial mufflers on such motorized "vehicles," a genuine crackdown would involve outright banishment of the sales of such nuisance/gross polluting vehicles. The raw gasoline that invariably gets spilled, leaked, and burped out unburned by these toys from hell puts the kids and the local environment at major risk for heinous toxic exposure, too. As a matter of pathetic statistics, the oil industry with its ships and tank farms and gas stations manages to spill and leak directly into local environments and aquifers, the equivalent of ONE THOUSAND Exxon Valdez oil spills EVERY YEAR. (Source, Earth Island Journal, www.earthisland.org)

And on an even more local level, I noticed something on my bike ride(s) up and down Oakland's Telegraph Avenue lately: A store called PRIMETIME, which specializes in selling only the most hideous artificially flavored, chemically dyed, inadvertantly or deliberately genetically tampered, pesticided and chemically fertilzed plastic wrapped and cardboard boxed corporate food in exchange only for WIC vouchers. This company I believe made its name in selling pet food and is now trying to foist these awful unnatural foods on the poor children who subsist on WIC vouchers - the store refuses to accept cash for its "food," this is strictly a WIC operation. They do sell some refrigerated Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) enhanced milk and also room temperature eggs, but that's about it, not a single bit of fresh produce or unprocessed/organic natural food can be had from this store. Is this any way to raise healthy kids???

Between stuff like that and the toxic soup of ongoing diesel bus and unregulated or underenforced diesel truck emissions in poor neighborhoods, it is a testament to the resiliancy of the human body that ANY child manages to grow up healthy in such a context.

I offer a prayer of thanks to my Canadian Baptist Mother, who, thank God, did not use WIC vouchers nor smoke, drink, or use/abuse any drugs while I was in gestation. Pretty sweet considering she has finally confided I was sort of an unplanned child!!! I guess this accounts in part for my lifelong pattern of suprising folks with stuff like this. I am a childless bachelor, not the type to type up stats like this, but what the hey. I studied statistics and they are too frequently ignored or distorted but the truth resides in them, more than in rhetoric, and I believe God lives somewhere in the house of truths.

"Gasoline rushes in where bicyclists fear to tread"....Jim's truth for today....

Notes:
*Katie Alvord, "Divorce Your Car," 2000


"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do." -- Eleanor Roosevelt