Once again, I am going to invoke the Howard Cosell rule.
Two weeks ago, Salman Rushdie was attacked while giving a talk in Chautaqua, New York. I actually wrote a reflection about it on another site, under a nom de plume I've been using. I didn't mention it on this blog, until now, not because I couldn't relate it to anything else I've been writing here--if you've been following this blog, you know that I can relate almost anything to cycling and my life. Rather, thinking about his attack was even more difficult than some of the other non-cycling events I've described.
For one thing, he is one of the world's best-known writers. While my written words probably won't ever have the influence of his, I feel that the attack on him was an attack on me. No one who is not doing harm to others deserves to have their freedom of expression--whether in the form of a creative work like a novel, the articulation of an idea or simply the way that person moves about in the world--inhibited, disrupted or ceased.
But, perhaps more importantly, that attack reaffirmed for me that such attacks are not perpetrated by "others." The young man who stabbed him was born and raised in the US nearly a decade after the Ayatollah Khomieni issued the fatwa calling for Rushdie's assassination. In other words, although he was radicalized during a visit with his father in Lebanon four years ago, he is as much a domestic terrorist as those who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021, threatened to kill anyone who certify the election or impeach Donald Trump, plotted to kidnap and execute Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer--and who have murdered abortion providers.
Oh, and I would put anyone who tries to negate the self-agency, let alone equality, of women and LGBTQIA people, in the same category. Yes, I include the Supreme Court justices who voted to strike down Roe v Wade. I am not a legal scholar, gender theorist or theologian, so please forgive me if I fail to understand the difference, in kind or in degree, of denying a novelist the right to use his language and creative powers, or a woman to do as she sees fit with her body, as they see fit.
Call me paranoid or alarmist if you like, but I don't think it's a very long or particularly slippery slope from telling a woman or girl that she can't terminate a pregnancy to telling someone like me that I couldn't access, not only medical procedures that have helped my body reflect my gender identity, but also the therapy, counseling and other support that have helped me not only to recover from the pain and trauma of living an inauthentic life, but also to use, and even treasure, the lessons and moments of joy I experienced along the way.
Or, for that matter, if a government can mandate--or radicalized mobs, whether they are based in Kansas or Kandahar, can intimidate--women and girls away from bodily autonomy, how far is it, really, from a ruler who doesn't allow women or girls to travel without male chaperones, or to ride a bicycle or drive a car at all? Does it really matter whether the ones who legislate or intimidate people from freely moving about in the way they choose, whether to get to work or school or for pleasure, have been elected to their offices, ascended to their thrones by birthright or take over the public space and discourse through aggressive displays of symbols like flags or by "rolling coal" with their SUVs and pickup trucks on steroids that take up the entire width of a roadway, including its shoulder?
Now, some of you think might be that I've stretched things a bit by comparing the attack on Salman Rushdie or the Supreme Court striking down Roe v Wade to the intimidation or harassment of cyclists. But for me, at least, they are all personal and come from the same impulses: those of people who simply can't face a world that's changing.
