There are a couple of really basic life lessons that you learn from Tuesday Night Worlds, and they apply today more than ever, and I'll try to spell them out here in a way that White Anxiety can understand.
1) If you show up to a fast road ride and you get shelled, that's your fault. Don't blame the guy at the front, drilling it, for the fact that you cannot keep up. He has trained his ass off. If you're unhappy with your fitness, or you're pissed off that Coal jobs haven't come back yet, then start training.
Don't blame the ride.
2) In a similar way, don't misunderstand something very obvious about that guy at the front...he is not Hispanic. Take Will Leet, for example. Or Jeff Bezos. Goldman Sachs. The Clinton Foundation. All of them are very, very white. Like, among the whitest people to ever be white in a white country and a white town full of white people. The only thing brighter than Will Leet's new chromed-out road bike is Jeff Bezos enormous, growing, very bald white head, both of which you can now see from outer space. So if you're trying to infer in some bizarre way that your lack of performance is about race, or that you've been maligned by someone who doesn't look like you, look again. The people with all the watts, just like the people with all the money, left to right...white people.
I went and voted this morning at 7 AM, shortly after the polls opened, at the same elementary school where my kids are in first grade. In the parking lot, the sheer volume of confederate flags, Trump T-shirts, and InfoWars inspired bumper stickers caught me by surprise. I just didn't think that, 2 years into this administration, that I'd be wading through a crowd of Still-Angry Rednecks, in the rain, to vote my conscience beside them.
Democracy is like a breakaway with too many guys in it. It works OK for a while, but eventually, people stop doing their part. One guy wants to sit on, which prompts another guy to do the same, and before you know it the 10 minute lead you had on the rest of the world has been reduced to nothing as you attack each other in the name of...well, you're not sure. But that guy wouldn't take a pull.
Adding people to the breakaway doesn't help it, and so it occurred to me that I honestly don't care if you vote today. At this point, if you need some kind of convincing about the need for your political voice, then this probably isn't the right move for you to mark anyway. It's just not clear to me that adding another 30 million vindictive, angry, partisan voters to what we already have here will actually improve anything.
But the minute you see Will Leet go up the road, you better jump on that train, and so will I, and maybe your friends can come too, if they want to work.
See also, Voting, and welcome back to the United States of America.
A grassroots racing team from Charlottesville, VA.
