Bicycles and The Great Leap Backwards

Photo: Wikipedia, Danish female bike

Americans hold constitutional elections in order to choose, among many positions in government, the local mayor. But a non-governmental organization (NGO), Bycs, which created the bicycle mayors’ program, wants to change that. How can an unelected ‘mayor’ be constitutional? “It is nice to have one, centralized voice,” … “And, honestly especially in the U.S., it’s so much easier to do as a party of one, than a committee, meeting, month to month. It’s a great way to speed things up. We have to catch up, to provide alternative transportation.” I’ve heard that ‘party of one’ tune before under totalitarian communism. https://bycs.org/

The nonprofit Bycs “wants to use the network to aim for an ambitious goal of moving half of all local trips to bikes by 2030 as a way to address climate change, air pollution, health, and other urban challenges.” https://www.technocracy.news/sustainable-mobility-half-of-all-city-trips-by-bicycle-by-2030/

Adam Stones, strategy and communications director for Bycs, advocates to use the Dutch bike control experiment around the world by 2030 in line with the 17 Sustainable Development (SD) goals of U.N.’s Agenda 2030.

The Dutch who already have a bike-obsessed culture, have chosen in 2016 a “bicycle mayor – a person who serves as a connecting point between city departments, nonprofits, and other bike advocates in order to make Amsterdam even more bikeable.”

The NGO Bycs wants to bring “bike mayors to 200 cities by the end of 2019. And they are already in nearly 30 cities, from São Paulo to Istanbul.”

Can you not envision thousands of people biking to work on the busy interstates that crisscross our nation’s capital and its surrounding suburbs? And these bikers would try to take their children to school, “bike-pooling,” lugging sacks of groceries on a bike, carrying everything else home on a bike, including perhaps perishables such as ice cream?

It would be so much fun biking in snow and on ice, especially for people with prosthetics, artificial knees, and other handicaps. It is indeed fun to have the option to bike in some picturesque areas, but the bike lanes are springing up all over the nation to the tune of billions of dollars, yet I see scarce few actually riding a bike on them because Americans love their cars and the freedom of mobility it affords.

Bikers can only travel so far, maybe 15 miles, if they are in good physical shape and young, before collapsing from the effort. Perhaps the idea is to keep people close to home so that the land can be re-wilded and protected from the encroaching humans.

The millennials who helped push this bike craze are actually driving alone to work in their expensive electric cars with a smug look on their faces and no idea where the electricity that powers their vehicles is coming from other than recharging stations popping up like mushrooms overnight, taking up parking spaces for the handicapped. They just know that they are saving the planet from an impending manufactured climate doom caused by the greedy humanity itself.

On the other hand, if they are unable to bike, humanity should move into the U.N. planned high-rise, walkability-designed urban areas, where everyone would be neatly stacked and packed in high-rises within five minutes walking or public transportation distance from home, work, shopping, and entertainment. Such a shrunken megalopolis would be a dream for globalists to control the population. To me, it will be The Great Leap Backward, the American version of China’s failed Great Leap Forward to total global control of the population.

We had public transportation under communism, only the elites had cars, and we never got to travel very far, only as far as our biking, walking, buses, or the train took us, if we could afford the tickets that were already subsidized by the government. The salaries were so low and equal, that things had to be subsidized by the communist government for people to afford basics such as transport, shelter, and food.

The bike “craze” began with United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development (SD) goals, specifically number 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities. https://www.government.se/government-policy/the-global-goals-and-the-2030-Agenda-for-sustainable-development/goal-11-sustainable-cities-and-communities/

If your roads are narrower, bike paths are springing up alongside roads, and parking lots have been taken out of existence, it is owed to the work of the “civil society” of the United Nations and its NGOs staffed by Americans who just know what is better for the planning of your community, where you live, where you go to school, what you study, where you go for recreation, and how you live your life in general and do business.

United Nation’s NGOs comprise a shadow government by proxy, unelected, but nevertheless quite powerful. Their Visioning Committees are working around the country to change your local and state governments and their zoning laws.

The 17 Sustainable Development (SD) goals were adopted at the U.N. Summit on September 25, 2015, committing the signatory countries to a world of “sustainable and equitable future” as part of U.N. Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development. It is a multi-faceted, well-moneyed effort to globalize the world for better control and redistribution of wealth under the aegis of the United Nations. https://www.government.se/government-policy/the-global-goals-and-the-2030-Agenda-for-sustainable-development/

The SD brainwashing encompasses everything around you. In April 2019 National Geographic dedicated an entire special edition to walkable Cities of the Future, sustainable land, rethinking cities (whose vision?), and Urban Hubs. “In a densely developed hub, sustainable land use within and outside its borders helps people thrive by providing water, food, and recreation. High-capacity transit reduces emissions and speeds commute times.”

The progressive argument is that an urban area is a good and safe place to raise a family. Is a large metropolis a nice place to raise children and a better place for them to live? As a parent, my answer is NO. I prefer country living and suburbia, much maligned by the progressive left as “suburban sprawl.”

Hong Kong, pictured in the Nat Geo next to the verdant Victoria Park, with its other vast and undeveloped land areas while people live-in high-rise spaces the size of cages like animals, is certainly no urban model to emulate.

Susan Goldberg questioned in National Geographic, “Should we live in dense urban areas with public transit and walkable amenities? In sprawling suburbs created by our infatuation with the car? In high rises like those envisioned by Le Corbusier, now dotting urban districts across China?” Some of these buildings, malls, and towns in China are still empty.

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, known as Le Corbusier, a Swiss-French architect and Bauhaus urban planner, considered the pioneer of modernism, argued in 1925 that everything on the right bank of the river Seine in Paris should be demolished – statues, homes, monuments, streets, and identical glass towers, 650 feet tall, should be built instead. A quarter of a mile apart, these towers would be surrounded by grass for pedestrians and elevated highways for automobiles.

Referring to his perceived war between “lovers of antiquities” and “progressive thinkers,” he allegedly stated that “progress is achieved through experimentation; the decision will be awarded on the field of battle of the ‘new.’” https://www.famous-architects.org/le-corbusier/

If we look at the amount of money and effort, mass indoctrination, including the most recent video, spent by the United Nations, academia, public schools, mass media, Hollywood, environmentalists, and “civil society” (I am still not sure to this day who the members of this ‘civil society’ are, although I have a pretty good guess – the globalist elite who know better what is good for us, like a kind and benevolent dictator.) to bring about world-wide compliance with its 1992 Agenda 21 now morphed into Agenda 2030, it seems that we are at war with the United Nation’s progressive plan called Agenda 2030.  This new “social contract” with 17 SD goals that no American citizen has voted on, “is good for us,” assures us Jeffrey Sachs of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. https://youtu.be/ElJDadfkhEo

The stakes are high – will we be able to keep our much envied “antiquated” American way of life, our very freedom and mobility which defines who we are?

Late Summer Rain Brings More Memories

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015
Water pump installed long before
I was born

The hot summer has been suddenly replaced by a cold-driving fall rain. The water is soaking steadily into the parched dirt. There is a hurricane on its way, disguising its ugly wrath under a flowery name, Florence. Nature can use the rain but not the wrath and destruction of this massive swirling giant, picking up speed in the Atlantic and moving towards the Carolinas.

We gave up watering the dry lawn a few weeks ago as the grass turned brown from the oppressively humid heat. It rained a lot earlier in the summer but then it stopped.

Wild animals, deer, rabbits, coyotes, and raccoons were coming closer and closer to the front door, looking for fresh water. I filled the three bird baths daily but the water was always gone. Deer trampled the flower beds searching for water and fresh green grass. Why this water tasted better than the pond or the river nearby, I would never understand.

On days like this, my memory takes me to my grandma’s clay dirt and straw brick house with its tiny windows. When it rained, the interior became quite dark so I sought the outdoors under the large awning over a concrete patio. I enjoyed sitting and watching the rain fall, turning the grassless yard into a sloshy landscape with tiny rivers dug into the mud. The yard birds chirped and the pig squealed with joy. Thunder in the distance broke the domestic tranquility and lightning cracked an invisible whip in the sky.

I was too young to know or understand why grandpa never graveled the yard, installed pavers for a pathway, or planted sturdy grass that we could walk on without sinking into deep mud. Grandma’s rubber boots helped if they did not get sucked in and stuck ankle deep with a grip so powerful, no pulling could disentangle the vice like hold of the mud. He probably could not afford pavers or gravel, raising six children even in the country was not easy.

I was just happy to be with him, to ask questions to which he always had a fascinating answer. Grandpa was a self-taught man who loved books. He instilled in me the love of reading, exploring, and asking questions of scholarly men from whom I learned so much.

He always brought out the few copies of National Geographic which a team of American archeologists had left behind when they finished their summer Roman digs at the edge of the village. They stayed with grandpa as he had a beautiful and fully furnished brick home that was never used by family unless his youngest son visited from the city 60 km away. He unlocked this magical house for him and I would sneak in and play with his Roman coin collection or grandma’s shoes and purse from her dowry trunk. As was the case with everyone, his brick home did not have running water or a sewer system. The outhouse was in the back and the cast iron water pump was in the middle of the yard.

The rest of the year, grandpa and grandma lived and slept in the tiny two-bedroom mud and straw brick house with the kitchen at the other end and a generous loft where he kept hay, dry corn, and wheat from that year’s harvest, along with armies of mice and numerous flee-infested cats who kept the mice population under control.

The peasants were lucky to get electricity in the early 1970s even though the village was located only 9 km from a very large industrial town. Before then, the oil lamps were the only form of light at night. No street lamps either, just the starry nights, darkness, and scary stories sitting with the neighbors outside the gate on the wooden bench, specially made for this purpose, for chatting with neighbors and catching up on the village news and gossip.

People lived so close to each other and crowded, separated only by a wooden fence, with no land in between homes. It was impossible not to know everybody else’s business. The rest of the land was used for personal gardening and for Communist Party’s collective farms.

Bolsheviks were U.N. Agenda 21/2030 compliant long before the globalists of today decided to install worldwide communism and force people off their private property into high-rise, mixed-use buildings in the city under the guise of Green Growth, Sustainability for the sake of environmental protection - such an easy way to control the dumbed-down and crowded population.

Grandpa commuted to work 18 km round-trip for over 40 years on his bicycle, rain or shine, even in the snow. He could not afford the rickety communist bus that ran twice a day to and from the city and riding for free in the open cargo area of a large factory truck like cattle was out of the question.

Today’s globalists are attempting to remove us from our cars and force everyone into public transportation and bikes. They are even going to tax bike users on the many expensive bike paths that are being built around the country in a mad rush to socially engineer everything we do because, if it worked so well for communist China and socialist Europe, it must be good for us too.

At least the Soviets pretended to care for agriculture, for the food supply of the people. They forcibly confiscated their property and moved them off the land into crowded villages in order to form their collective farms on the joined land where everybody worked and, regardless of effort applied, got an even portion at harvest time, while the commies took their lion’s share first.

Some of the villagers worked harder than others but they shared the harvest equally. Humans are not so altruistic that they would put forth effort for others indefinitely. Pretty soon everyone slacked off.  There was no incentive to work harder. The factory communist motto, “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us,” eventually stretched to farming as well and fields remained unproductive and full of weeds. Such was socialism, it bred laziness - everyone became dependent on the omnipotent government who doled out crumbs.