Donald Trump has labelled Mexican immigrants as drug
dealers, rapists and murderers.
In my grandparents' generation, Italian immigrants were
almost automatically seen as criminals and the Irish who came a generation
earlier were viewed as drunken brawlers. And Asians, particularly
Japanese-Americans during World War II, were depicted as shifty and
untrustworthy.
These days, when someone uses the word "thug",
it's assumed that person is referring to a black male. Likewise,
"Arab" and "Muslim" are uttered interchangeably; both are
used as synonyms for "terrorist."
Now it seems that, at least in the meida,
"cyclist" has become the new stereotype. Whenever some drunk or
distracted driver runs one of us down, we made the misguided choice of riding a
bicycle--never mind that we were riding in a "protected" lane and the
driver veered into it. But we are not, in those situations, labeled as
"cyclists."
Instead, the c-word seems to refer only to those who are
breaking the law--or, in one recent case, windows.
Now, I'll be the first to say that
the pack who rode the wrong way on a Chelsea street--especially the
member(s) who smashed the rear window of someone's new car and who smacked into
a police officer--should be prosecuted. The news reports I've seen and
heard about it, however, seem designed to whip up as much hysteria as possible
against anyone who pedals two wheels on this city's streets. You can hear
it in the way "reporters" (Where have journalistic standards gone?)
elicit reactions from bystanders. To hear them, cyclists are as much a
menace to this city as MS-13 is to some immigrant communities.
To make a bad "report" even worse, the accompanying
video, which purports to be a record of the rampage, actually has nothing to do
with it.
