So here we are, modernity, the cutting edge, tablets and smart phones. No more relying on the creek for breakfast, most of us instead a slave to the grocery store and the frozen and processed foods inside. The bow long gone, we hunt these days with shopping carts and debit cards.

While nobody’s shooting fish-thieving eagles in the isles of the local Safeway or Stater Brothers, that biological urge that helped keep us safe for so many thousands of years by instinctively fighting off rivals threatening to swipe our limited resources is still with us lurking in the oldest parts of our primate brain. Hardwired and instinctive…you can take the caveman out of the cave but you can’t take the cave out of the caveman. Or at least, a few thousand years of civilization isn’t nearly enough time to undo such a thing. Even then, there’d have to be some benefit gained from a non-competing altruism that would allow those who lack the this urge to proliferate…to live long and prosper and erase those genes responsible for our monkey-fighting clean from our genetic code. All this is moot anyway that fossil is still here today deep within us all (still fun to think about…I mean, if we didn’t fight, would we still be human? Whoa.)

Cavemen didn’t live alone, those that tried surely entered the food chain a few links lower than most. So as a result, those like-minded folks that grouped together naturally, finding strength in numbers, lived longer, ensuring it was their genes that got a spot in the modern human genome.  Now days, what used to be tribes and family groups are the the likes of the AARP or the Tea Party.

These groups, just as their ancient cousins, get along just fine with each other until…until they feel a threat to their status quo. Until there is, again, competition for a limited resource be it something tangible or just an ideal, a way of life. Until uncle Sam wants to cut Medicare. Then watch out as septuagenarians everywhere go digging through their stashed hoards for half-century old boxing gloves, rusting nine irons, or pitch-forks…or at least rally in preparation for battle on the first Tuesday in November. While the struggle isn’t literally life or death these days, it often times feels that way if you are in the thick of it and, what’s more, fighting for it gives you purpose (a whole other can of worms).  


From pro-choice vs. pro-life to a much broader liberalism vs. conservatism fighting for a monopoly on America’s compass, control of the reins, and the direction we go as a nation, group on group fighting is everywhere you look these days. These latter two groups have become as disparate as the wheels on an old penny-farthing, both thinking they’re the big wheel up front, yet they forget they’re still part of the same machine that needs to function for us to move forward as “One Nation, under God”.

That’s the idea I want to talk about, that’s what I want to discuss here. I want to frame the road as a resource that’s indeed being fought over, especially in America, with hopes of, and ideas for, a solution once we see this big picture.

In America, we long ago decided that the roads were a place for cars and their motored-like alone. A group formed called “motorists” that took the road-resource as their own. When bicycles and the group “cyclists”, decades prior removed from the roadways, tried to come back to the road be it for the commute, recreation, or necessity, that ancient and subconscious instinct kicked in on both sides. Motorists perceived cyclists as a threat to their status quo as cyclists sought to poach a little asphalt with which to belong…and the old bows drew back again, not entirely under our conscious control.