The only bike fiesta in Spain that's a guaranteed shit storm

So it's the time of year for Fiesta de la Bicicleta, which is organized by the COPE, the Catholic Church's radio station. I am no fan of COPE; neither is The Owner. I find their attitude towards anything that's not distinctly pro-Franco kind of nauseating. However, they are the main promoters behind the one-day "Fiesta de la Bicicleta", so there's gotta be SOME kind of good going on there; they could just can it altogether. So I post the information on the PedaLibre group message board, figuring that people might be interested.

OOOOOHHHH NO. TFS. (Ouch! Sorry.) All of a sudden a shit storm ensues because apparently, because (TFS....) no one talks to anybody about anything that could be improved. No one turns around to the COPE and says, Great Event! Know what would make it even better? Why not do it every month? No. Instead, they're all sitting like little kids at their computers, sending off messages about what jerks and child molesters the priests at the COPE are, and that everybody should avoid them...

On the one hand, I understand where the protests are coming from. That the City Council decides to make one universal gesture towards cycling every year in order to shut everybody up and to try to make political hay from it is cynical at best. It would seem counterintuitive that the most conservative radio station in the country would support an activity that’s generally associated with fairly progressive politics. And you’d think that, for one day a year, the drivers of Madrid could behave themselves and give everybody else space: they do it for the Saint Sylvester Half-Marathon, organized by Nike every December 31st; they do it for the Vuelta; they’ll do it for the Cabalgata de los Reyes, which is the Spanish equivalent of the Santa Claus Parade. But there’s something about the Fiesta de la Bicicleta that just makes Madrid residents see red. They can’t get over the idea that they’re being asked to sacrifice the streets for half a day, and cyclists get hit, they get verbally abused, they’re told to stay off the roads....and we’re talking families getting threatened by cars, not some dreadlocked kid trying to BMX his way down the Castellana off the hoods of every BMW along the way. (Though one can understand the temptation.)

At times like this, rather than pull out TFS, you have to take a deep breath and remind yourself that the cultural changes that many other societies went through just didn’t happen here. They didn’t have the riots of ´68 or the petroleum crisis of ´73; many of the mistakes and issues which we’ve learned how to deal with (the do’s and don’t’s of activism, for example) are things that are only starting to come to the forefront now. It’s natural, I suppose, that the antagonism with which things get done here will not go away easily. That Javier Solana, a former Spanish Minister of Defense, is head negotiator with NATO continually blows me away. But there’s some hope as well: If Javier Solana can become a reference for negotiating skills, why can’t the Pedalibreros?

Especially since we’re talking about an event that the folks at the COPE aren’t wild about organizing. It’s great publicity, but it’s a pain in the ass to organize, and The Owner told me (I don’t know if this is true or not) that the woman who organized the event last year had a miscarriage after everything was over. So why wouldn’t they want more help with it? Establish the rules first, make the first one a real success, and then ride on the success of that by amping it up. Have a Fiesta de la Bicicleta each month in a different area of town – Chamberí, Tetuán, Carabanchel, Vallekas – getting the people in the biking organizations in each part of town in on the act. Where are the good place to do biking and tapas? What about community arts groups?

And this is where being North American kicks in because you start realizing that there are other options, that you don't have to accept things just because someone says they have to be that way.

Things will always change slowly if they're going to change for the better.

But it was really hard not to think of some of those guys - and I'm not being sexist, each and every one of them was of the male persuasion - and NOT think of my Grade Five teacher, Margaret Rupert....

"KNOCK IT OFF, OR I'M GONNA KNOCK YOUR HEADS TOGETHER, YOU BUNCH!!!!"