Let's do a bit of role playing for a minute. Take a second and make a genuine effort to strap yourself into the shoes of Joe Stemeyer. No, he's not a real person, but for this exercise you'll not only make him real, but you'll see the world through his eyes and feel what he feels.
Up until a few years ago you had a pretty solid job maybe working in IT, or as a construction foreman, or as an account manager for a solid local business; the particular job doesn't really matter, because you no longer have it.
In fact, you've been struggling since about 2008 to keep bills paid. Your wife is barely speaking to you because of the financial stress, but so far you've managed to keep your two daughters (3, and 8) from knowing that anything's wrong.
You've managed to do this by working two, sometimes three jobs to replace the income you lost when your "good job" went away. Sometimes you get about 6 hours of sleep a night, and you consider yourself lucky when you do. The little bit of free time you do have, you spend with your family, desperately trying to not let the frustrations associated with working well below your skills and education, out on the people for which you're doing all this.
Heck, you know people who have it worse, at least you can hold down those jobs, even if the boss at your afternoon shift has been making comments recently about finding an excuse to fire you so he can bring one of his buddies in as a replacement. But since you're attentive, polite, and professional, doing everything asked of you, he can't justify doing it. So you're safe, as safe as one can be with a crappy job. And aside from those times when the various schedules of your jobs have overlapped, you've always been on time.
All of these thoughts run through your head as you pull that head out from under an orange, hardware store apron and hop in to your car to do a shift at the shipping company. You've got this quick-change thing down to a science, even your oldest daughter would be proud of how fast you can swap outfits. The shipping job's at a warehouse across town, and you've got thirty minutes to be there for the afternoon shift; it only takes fifteen if you go through downtown, even with the stop lights.
But about twenty minutes into your second commute of the day, traffic isn't moving. In fact, you can hear angry horns ahead in the distance. All you can make out from where you are, is the occasional car ahead of you hopping a curb to take a side street.
After enough people manage to squirm their vehicles off the main road, you get close enough to see what's going on. And you're greeted with the naked ass of a man with unwashed-looking hair and a ratty beard, sitting astride the seat of an old bicycle. He's not alone either; he smiles as he passes and a gang of similar looking, though mostly clothed people pedal by on their bikes along with him.
There must be hundreds of them. Mostly 20-40 years old and Caucasian, although the occasional minority is represented as well. Along with the occasional bare ass, you start noticing a feeling in your stomach that reminds you of being punched. The people on the bikes seem to be having a great time, but all you can think about is how you're going to be able to buy your daughter something, anything, for her birthday next week when you lose this job for which you're about to be late.
Critical Mass
If you've been fortunate enough to have avoided one of these nightmares, you either don't live in a big city, or you're just a lucky person in general. The events are held the last Friday of each month, by various individuals, for the express purpose of shutting down all traffic within a portion of the city.
Why?
Because cars are bad. Because the roads are crowded. But mainly because some spoiled urbanites have no perspective on or consideration for the lives of other people who just need to get somewhere, possibly important.
Recently in Brazil, another person had a similar experience to "Joe"at one of these events. Here's how it went:
Seems to have gone fine for him; for the protesters -- not so much.
The problem with Critical Mass is that their "protests" are, for a genuine lack of a better way to put it, fucking stupid. You can't effect positive, meaningful social change by enraging the people you're hoping to reach against you. You'd think that was simple, common sense, and it is, but here's where common sense fails: these events aren't truly about accomplishing anything other than stroking the egos of the dipshits who participate in them.
There's not a single valid argument to be had in favor of these demonstrations. You don't protest global warming by burning down a forest. You don't hold a meeting to discuss starving kids in Somalia at Golden Corral. You shouldn't beat the crap out of counter-protesters if you're running a peace rally. And, for Schwinn's sake, you don't protest the problem of our roads being congested like stage three pneumonia by turning yourself into human phlegm.
But that's what Critical Mass is doing, and that's precisely why these events aren't about anything other than the participants deriving the rare sense of satisfaction that comes from feeling smugly righteous and operating with (at least the illusion of) impunity-by-numbers.
Anyone who has read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People can immediately see the flaws in this protest scheme, and that the participants have never learned to "begin with the end in mind". Then again, I strongly suspect none of them were ever required to read the book, given that any higher education they've had was most likely in a liberal arts major (on their parents' dime, no less). So let's reference a book many of them may have read, and one highly recommended by Glenn Beck: Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals".
"To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system"
Huh... who'd have fuckin' thought it? The best way to fix the problem with traffic would be to trade your spandex hotpants for slacks, and your slacktivism for a position at the City Manager's office. Now, these things require more effort than pedaling down Main during lunch hour, but people who actually do care about any issue (even one as completely trivial in the grand scheme of things as this), should be willing to make sacrifices to their busy schedules of sipping sangria and shopping at Ikea.
The point is, if you genuinely care about an issue, take a hint from Ghandi when he said "Be the change you want to see in this world, and not the change someone else will want to see hit by a car". (Close enough.) Instead of following this advice, Critical Mass events are devoted to being the problem they see in the world.
Do not do this.
I have to state, for posterity, that I do not condone plowing your VW Jetta through a crowd of smug slacktivist assholes blocking traffic. And not just for posterity, but also because this article is being posted on a website filled with members who have hopped into vehicles and made 800 mile road trips just to punch other people in the mouth for something they've said.
Also, I'm sure there's a law on the books by now about enticing vehicular manslaughter over the Internet. And considering how much I strongly prefer the unidirectional use of a certain orifice, I think two paragraphs worth of text telling you bastards not to go out looking for spandex-wearing weenies to turn into brightly colored road goo are fairly important to include in this piece.
People-who-participate-in-Critical Mass-events: You are our Douchebag(s) of the Month.
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