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Tribalism is a serious problem in our society, and the media often make it worse.
In the world of cycling, and on road.cc particularly, we hear about “cyclists” and “drivers” on a daily basis.
The use of these words not only assumes the existence of such categories of people, but it also plays a significant role in constructing them.
This, in turn, reinforces the “drivers vs cyclists” narrative, one of the many variants of tribalism corrupting our thinking.
Words are powerful.
With the exception, perhaps, of those for whom cycling is a profession, the word “cyclist” does not apply to anybody else. The sole act of driving a car does not make one a “driver”. When I make dinner I’m not a “cook”, when I write an email I’m not a “writer”, when I paint a wall in my house I’m not a “decorator” and so on. To put it another way, riding a bike does not define who I am. Nor does driving a car. These are actions, not categories of people.
The urge to categorise people according to what they happen to be doing at any given moment is not healthy.
A recent road.cc article reporting on a crime where somebody shot somebody else in the US was presented as if it was somehow about cycling since the killer was described as a “cyclist”, as he happened to be riding a bicycle when the incident took place.
The original article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel described the killer as a “bicyclist”, and the Associated Press, from which news outlets picked up the story, ran the headline “Cyclist gets 25 years in deadly road rage shooting”.
All of this gives more ammunition to the relentless anti-cycling campaign that much of the media are engaged in.
But I think road.cc should have the moral obligation to counter the normalisation of the “cyclists vs [insert other category of people]” narrative.
I wonder, for example, if alongside the “Near Miss of the Day” feature, there could be one like the “Bad Headline of the Day”, pointing out instances where the word “cyclists” is obviously misused and serves to misrepresent a story as being about an imaginary category of (bad!) people rather than what it is really about.
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This, in turn, reinforces the
This, in turn, reinforces the “drivers vs cyclists” narrative
It’s not a ‘narrative’, it’s the truth. Cyclists, and I even include ebikers in this because they are subject to the same driving behaviours, experience this every day or multiple times every day. Forget all this homely ‘why can’t we all just get along’ bollocks, we are under attack from aggressive, thoughtless, cyclist-despising b******s like the driver of Nissan Juke SL60 KCC who never even considered not overtaking me, but instead cut in right in front to give considerably more clearance to oncoming Jaguar than the 20-30 cms allowed to me- that’s less than 1/5th of the recommended distance
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