in an effort to get more exercise and further reduce our footprint, both A and i recently converted our commuters to the sturdy, fun, and unbelievably useful xtracycle.
and yesterday, as i was getting ready to leave my office i pulled up the handy byCycle.org page for portland. if you’ve not tried it out yet, i recommend giving it a whirl. with the caveat, though, that you may not always get the best or safest, or even possible route:
for anyone who doesn’t know the area, one can not actually get across the highway/approach to the ross island bridge like it’s shown. there is a pedestrian bridge there on 9th, but there’s not really (yet?) a way for byCycle.org to reflect that.
in any case, as the traffic on my family’s email list has emphasized, it’s a giddy, joy-filled time for so many of us. a bitter reminder of bigotry and homophobia in many states, as well. in any case, yes we could, yes we did, and like the man kinda said, the road ahead is very steep and treacherous. it’s like Ramona Africa said at Kent State in 2000 (and other times…) –
This hypocrisy has to stop but it will only stop when we stop it. These people running this system are out of control and it is up to us to bring things back into control. back into focus. It is the only way it’s going to happen. And what these people are banking on is that all we will do is come out. They don’t care if you have a demonstration with ten million people for one day or two days. They don’t care about that. We have to set an example every day, every day, anytime this system comes at us by shooting an innocent person down, putting an innocent person in jail, anytime we see injustice, terrorism, treachery, we must rise up against it, We must!. We have to send a strong, clear message, clear message to those running the system, that their reign of terror is over, that the people are awake. We’re on our feet, we have stretched and yawned the sleep out and we are ready to deal with them.
venceremos!
