Category: Personal Page 44 of 59

Found this bike in front of my house, yesterday AM. At first, I thought some kid had probably dropped a stolen bike. I thought I’d just haul it into my yard and report the serial to the Arlington PD. But when I picked the bike up, it became clear that it was very much the other way around – the bike dropped the rider.

As best I can tell, the rider’s laces (which you can see in the picture) got twisted around the pedal. This, in turn, took him down before tearing off. And he must have gone down *hard* – what you see here is not only a nearly bent off pedal, but a crank arm that has been bent back over the chainring and frame. Outside of the picture is a front wheel with a hub also pulled out of the forks. I expected to see blood on sidewalk, with a hit like that.

But nothing. Looks like the rider left under his own power. And the bike remains.

I’ve left it there in case he might want to come back and get it, but I’m doubting that it’s going anywhere. Much as it pains me to do it to a bike, it’s into the trash tomorrow. Absolutely nothing of value on this bike, and to repair and donate it would cost more (in even the cheapest parts) than to buy a new one at Walmart.

(Related: Invisible Riders. An excellent look at the people who form most of the market for this kind of bike. )

Two stories reminded me of the importance of fighting the good fight, today.  First up, we have the Amish of Nickel Mines.  I’m generally rather critical of the Amish belief system, but I have to give them much credit for their actions in the wake of the loss of their daughters a year ago.  Not only did they attend the funeral of the shooter, but it was recently revealed that they have even given financial assistance to the murderer’s widow.

Think about that.  Not only did they show their forgiveness through their public presence at the funeral of the man who killed their children, but they followed that through with private support of the person they’d expect to be closest to the killer.  Honestly, that is breathtaking.

I don’t know that I could do the same.  In fact, I’m pretty sure I could not.  But that does not stop me from recognizing that it’s something we’d all be better off emulating.  Bitterness and hate are ugly things, and forgiveness goes a long way towards countering them.  Hatred will get you nowhere, and the sooner we can excise it from ourselves, the better off we all are.   Anger, however, is not the same thing.  Which brings me to the second story.

Brandon Mayfield.  You may recall him as the lawyer who was wrongly accused of masterminding the Madrid train bombings.  He, too, found a way to forgive the FBI for ruining his life by fingering him as a terrorist (tho’ I’m sure the $2m settlement made that a bit easier than one might otherwise expect).  He dropped all personal claims against the FBI, but retained one very important claim – “that two provisions of the Patriot Act were unconstitutional on their face.”  Mayfield is moving on with his life while vigorously pursuing an action against the sneak-and-peek and related sharing provisions of the Patriot Act.  His is a rare position – he has solid standing (the basis on which many claims against the Patriot Act have been thrown out) to challenge these Constitution-circumventing provisions.  Mayfield puts it this way:

“We have a perfect balance between liberty and security, between criminal investigation and privacy. It’s called probable cause,” he said. “We ironed out these issues a long time ago. That’s why we’re such a wonderful country.”

Indeed.  Would that we all could put aside our bitterness and hatred while continuing to fight the good fights.

Like many other people, I’ve been watching the new Ken Burns series – The War. Yes, it’s about World War II, which is probably among the most documented events in history. What more is there to say? Well . . . plenty. Without taking away from many of the existing efforts at examining WWII, I think that The War does an excellent job of zeroing in on the most important thing – the human cost of war. Please give it a chance.

Update: I happened to be watching Ken Burns get interviewed on the Daily Show, and he just said that he doesn’t think he could have made it 10 years ago, because the WWII vets didn’t really want to talk about it, and that he wouldn’t be able to make it 10 years from now, because so many of them will be gone.  It’s his experience that right now, at this point in time, a lot of WWII vets are willing to talk.  I bring this up because it fits with something I was shocked to learn a couple of days ago – my own grandfather is watching this series.  It’s shocking not just because he’s never been one for documentaries or history, but because the subject of his time in the Pacific in WWII (and esp. in Nagasaki, immediately after the atom bomb was dropped) has rarely been a subject he was willing to broach, nevermind discuss or let others examine.  I hope this series doesn’t disappoint him.

The appalling state of human rights in Burma is largely overlooked on the world stage. But it means a lot to those who live there. And it’s those who live there that are risking much to take a stand. The New York Times is reporting that:

The largest street protests in two decades against Myanmar’s military rulers gained momentum on Sunday as thousands of onlookers cheered huge columns of barefoot Buddhist monks and shouted support for the detained pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

While it gives me hope for Burma, it also worries me. The same article notes that:

The public display of discontent in Myanmar mirrors that of the previous uprising — anger over a brutal and incompetent military government that has turned one of Southeast Asia’s best-endowed and most-sophisticated nations into one of its most-repressed and poverty-ridden.

That previous uprising – in 1988 – resulted in a bloodbath. I wish I could do more than this. I wish the world would do more than nothing.

Richard Jewell, wrongly implicated in the bombing of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, died today:

Jewell, who was working as a sheriff’s deputy as recently as last year, was a security guard in 1996 at the Olympics in Atlanta. He was initially hailed as a hero for spotting a suspicious backpack in a park and moving people out of harm’s way just before a bomb exploded during a concert.

The blast killed one and injured 111 others.

Three days after the bombing, an unattributed report in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution described him as ”the focus” of the investigation.

Other media, to varying degrees, also linked Jewell to the investigation and portrayed him as a loser and law-enforcement wannabe who may have planted the bomb so he would look like a hero when he discovered it later.

I lived less than a mile from the bomb site, and had left the actual site only a couple of hours before the bomb exploded.  Like everyone else in Atlanta at the time, I was intensely focused on it.  And, also like everyone else, I soon became damn sure that Richard Jewell had done it, after listening to and reading all the reports.  Except:

Eventually, the bomber turned out to be anti-government extremist Eric Rudolph, who also planted three other bombs in the Atlanta area and in Birmingham, Ala. Those explosives killed a police officer, maimed a nurse and injured several other people.

Remember this, the next time you just “know” that someone did something.  I’m sorry, Mr. Jewell.  We did you wrong.