I don't know if there's an organized motorcyclist group on dKos (search didn't turn one up), so this diary is a bit of a feeler. I've posted diaries about aviation, books, and current events, but I'm a motorcyclist too and perhaps there are others like me among the Kossacks.
This is a two-part entry about the recent biker/SUV driver confrontation in NYC. Both posts first appeared on my personal blog, one on Oct 4 and one today.
From Oct 4 2013:
By now everyone has heard about the motorcycle riders who beat up an SUV driver in New York City. The media is depicting it as an unprovoked attack and almost everyone has written off the bikers as dangerous thugs who should be run off the road. Here's an email I got from a friend yesterday:
Paul,
I didn't want to post this on facebook, but here's some relevant info about the biker beat down in NYC.
The New York media is coming down on the side of the SUV asshole. I’m not a biker, I’m a NJ paramedic. From my 37 years on the job, I might be considered a professor of panic. It’s not uncommon for people to panic in the face of unexpected adversity.
I’ve played the start of the video over and over. To me two things are clear; The driver panicked when he was confronted by the angry hoard of bikers when he accidently struck the stopped bike. His wife and child were also in the SUV. I have no clue what was going though his head other then "I gotta get the fuck outta here, these guys are crazy."
Secondly, the blood-thirsty wolf-pack pursuing the SUV were hell bent on revenge. Who knows if they even knew the extent of the devastating injuries to Edwin Mieses.
I don’t think this event will pass in one news-cycle (pardon the pun). The bikers weren’t on some poker run for charity, they were asshole stunt bikers.
“The bikers were part of a group called Hollywood Stuntz, who all hoped to flood Times Square with their motorcycles. NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said his department was prepared for the group, yielding 15 arrests, confiscating 55 motorbikes and issuing 68 summonses all unrelated to the Lien assault.”
Well, at least my friend admits the SUV driver was an asshole, too. That's something. Everyone else watches the video of the SUV driver crushing a biker's legs and spine with his 5,000 pound vehicle and thinks shit hot, one less biker on the road. For some strange reason I don't see it that way. Here's the response I sent to my friend:
Thanks for the additional info. I am following the story, and I agree: the media's in the can for the SUV driver and. as always, is 100% anti-biker. Of course it doesn't help that the bikers were asshole stunters (bikers hate those guys too, because they give the rest of us a bad name) or that the one biker brake checked the SUV driver at the start of the video.
Tell you what, though, that SUV driver did something to enrage the bikers before anyone started taping. I know it in my bones, because I've been there. And I'll bet whatever he did was deliberate and egregious. I can't condone road rage, but at the same time I understand the impulse to run the guy down and beat him up.
FWIW, from a biker's point of view: cops, NYPD in particular, are pro-motorist and anti-biker/anti-pedestrian/anti-bicyclist. If the incident had stopped where the video starts, with the SUV driver panicking and running over the biker, the police would have done nothing, or even worse, would have let the SUV driver go free while arresting the injured biker instead. And those bikers knew that. Everybody knows that. The only justice the SUV driver was ever going to get had to be home made, as it were.
I'll probably blog some about the incident, if only to offer a contrasting point of view. I'm well aware that everyone else in the world has already decided the SUV driver was an innocent victim of biker thuggishness and has moved on.
No, I don't condone road rage. But I understand it.
From Oct 8 2013:
Click photo to link to story
Uh huh. That's what I thought, only it looks as if I didn't know the half of it. If this guy speaks the truth, the NYC SUV driver not only started the confrontation, he did it by swerving into a stream of bikers in another lane and hitting one of them hard enough to knock him off his bike. I've been riding since 1964 and have lost count of the times I've seen cagers ... motorists, to be more polite ... pull shit like that. He's lucky he wasn't beaten to death.
Also interesting: the emerging story that as many as three off-duty NYC cops were riding with the group of bikers that morning, and reports that one of them participated in the beating. Off duty, NYC cops who ride motorcycles probably feel the same way about the SUV driver, and cagers in general, as I do. On duty, they have to comply with NYPD's unwritten policy that motorists are allowed to get away with murder.
Oh, and the widely-reported "fact" that the biker group involved in the NYC confrontation was called Hollywood Stuntz? Also bullshit. It's the vainglorious nickname of an individual biker, who may or may not have organized the ride.
Of course the press will go right on reporting that the Hollywood Stuntz biker gang beats up innocent motorists as part of their on-going terror campaign against decent god-fearing normals. So what else is new?