Hah

Last week, the President of the United States of America was in town, stumping for the senior incumbent senator of the great state of Washington, Patty Murray; among other events, he was scheduled to speak at the U of W’s basketball stadium, the Hec Edmondson Pavilion, a location I ride past almost daily on my way to school.

Fucking A if the traffic wasn’t terrible; the cops had closed off a number of streets around campus, while at the same time, more people than usual were on their ways over there; I got to be even more smug than usual as I passed over the freeway seeing the long lines of cars all backed up in both directions, but even more to the point, I just had to wonder—as I’m often wont to do—about why folks put up with such shit. While I’m patently aware that there are myriad ways that people choose to live their lives and, to some degree, no better ways of doing so apart from the perspective of the person making that choice (although I’m enough of an Aristotelian to question that by holding to some relatively objective notion of human flourishing), I do have to admit that it confounds me as to why anyone would choose to sit in a car behind an endless line of similarly entombed drivers when they could pedal freely in the open air as an alternative.

What was also cool was that I got to cruise around behind Husky Stadium on streets that were closed off with sawhorses; I wondered whether I was breaking the law and if Secret Service men would leap out of the shrubbery to prevent me from making my way forward. But no such eventually ensued and I enjoyed a pleasant ramble on car-free streets while at the same time savoring the experience of seeing thousand of Obama supporters queuing up to catch of glimpse of the POTUS.

Bikes for President!