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18 December, 2004
Is Winter Biking Activism?

This year is my first year of winter biking. People tut-tut me when they discover that I perform this shameful act out in public. They sound as if they would rather see me filling future landfills with eventually discarded car parts and polluting the same air they patriotically pollute. They harrumph at me that winter biking is dangerous at the same as time they complain about cyclists on their roads.

Of course biking on the road is dangerous. That’s why I don’t do it. Does anyone out there think that it’s safe to drive the same way in the winter as in the summer? So why would the same principle not extend to cycling? If people think I’m out there tooling around like a madman doing my best to slide under the tires of their Earth-forsaking SUVs, then clearly they’re the ones not thinking.

A secondary reason I ride my bike in the winter is to reduce pollution. The primary reasons are more selfish: I save money and I get exercise. Plus, I’d rather risk a bylaw ticket with my bike on the sidewalk then risk a t-bone on the streets in a car.

Maybe all of this makes me an activist. Indeed, I am acting on what I see as right and proper, as opposed to just talking about it. But one thing that’s comically ironic about today’s society is that the word “activist” has become a dirty epithet even as more and more disparate people are engaging in activism.

I know a man in his late 50s who owns a property with a view. He is not what you would call counter-cultural. Nothing about him is freaky or weird. He’s just a normal guy with a sharp mind and a good sense of humour.

But a developer is threatening to spoil his view. So he’s off to meetings at city hall. Because of his lack of long hair, earrings, and liberal arts education, few would see him as an activist. But I’ll be darned if he’s not fighting against a developer.

I’ll tell you the funniest example of this phenomenon. The leader of those who hate activists the most is perhaps the best-known activist in Canada right now. That activist is none other than Ralph Klein.

Condemning activism was a popular and easy sport when activists were fighting against what the detractors believed. But now how can these followers of a peculiar blend of Darwinism and Creationism justify their ranting slurs when their own messiah is busy writing letters to Parliament and rallying troops to his cause?

Activism has suddenly become so fashionable that even “Alberta's Catholic bishops have sent letters to their congregations, telling them it's their right and responsibility to fight for the traditional definition of marriage,” according to cbc.ca.

Of course, anyone who can bend their mind far enough to accept Klein’s “Every Canadian is equal but some are more equal than others” Orwellian contradiction should have no problem casting aspersions at “tree-hugging” activists while being “the right kind of activists” themselves.

It seems to me that activists have generally been liberal simply because polluting, widening income disparity, and war have been so popular for the last while. But now Canada is making steady progress in the area of social progression. We’re even attracting the attention of European nations with the same sensibilities. In the face of such changing winds, I guess it makes sense that the poor-person-stomping, SUV-driving warmongers are getting their turn at activism. Now they know how it feels.

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