Violence at Seattle Critical Mass

Yesterday’s Critical Mass demonstration ride, seems to have turned ugly with a confrontation between a driver and some cyclists. People seem to be pre-disposed to sympathize with one side of the story or another. I’ll try to give you both sides here. As we all know, the news folks like to sensationalize because that makes more interesting “news”. So here is where you are most likely to hear about this:

Full story on King 5

You’re less likely to hear the cyclists tell their stories candidly in their own private forum. If you were to peek inside their dark, smoky clubhouse you might expect to hear them working each other up to a frenzy like a bunch of savages drunk on chain lube, chanting hatred slogans and beating drums. But it turns out, that even “amongst themselves” the cyclists are real people too, and they dislike violence and confrontation as much as the rest of “us” (whoever “they” and “us” are).

Here is one cyclists report of the incident, that I received because of an email list I am on:
3-4 bikers were blocking off a car so the rest of the riders can continue, they were telling the driver that he needs to wait couple of minutes. Driver was inpatient, and kept telling things like “I have a reservation, I have to go” There was more bikes blocking him off because of the argument, at some point the driver got very mad, and turned around going on the side walk, almost hitting some bikes. Then the bikers started getting closer to the car so he wouldnt drive in the middle of the riders, and the argument got heated. Bikers were telling him to wait, and all of a sudden the driver said something like “Fuck this” and drove into the bikers. He intentionally hit people, injuring 2 bikers, and smashing couple of bikes, and back packs. He started driving away while everyone was running away from him so they wouldnt get hit as well.

Here are some candid quotes from some of cyclists that were actually there (as discussed on their own website - not for the benefit of the news people):

S: I gotta say—whatever the driver did do, he certainly didn’t deserve the treatment I saw. I did what I could to make the situation (a little) better, and I hope I never have to see that again.

J: Breaking news: Assholes ride bikes too!

E: As we all know, rarely are these kinda things totally one-sided.

M: 99 percent of the people in the mass are good people - ones that aren’t starting fights or participating in mob violence.

P: Everybody already knows this, but it’s our individual responsibility to communicate with people when they’re out of line before the mob mentality develops. It sucks that it got violent afterwards.

The bottom line is this, there are some jerks that ride bikes and there are some jerks that drive cars, but let’s please try not to judge the whole group by the actions of a few individuals - how many times do we have to go over this?