RACING UNION - conversion

Saturday, July 15, 2006

i will be straightforward and say that the stories i have read about the links between kids and guns and drugs and warlords have always freaked me out. there is just something so very wrong about all this:

which is why i smiled so broadly when i read jay uhlfelder's email on saturday afternoon. he always seems to come through with really good stuff. he happened to catch this from the bbc web page:

DR Congo backs 'guns for bikes'

A scheme under which gunmen in the Democratic Republic of Congo are given bicycles in exchange for their weapons is being extended due to its success. Ngoy Mulunda, a pastor in the south-eastern Katanga region, says he has been given some 6,500 weapons in the past year, which he has destroyed. The programme is now being extended to the neighbouring South Kivu province.

A BBC correspondent says it has proved more successful than the UN disarmament exercise, following a five-year war. The BBC's Jonathan Kacelewa in Bukavu says a bicycle, worth about $50, makes a big difference to the lives of local people. In South Kivu, however, zinc roofing sheets are being given out instead of bicycles. The scheme, run through Pastor Mulunda's NGO Parec, is now being backed by President Joseph Kabila. Congolese troops, backed by United Nations peacekeepers, have been forcibly disarming militias in eastern DR Congo ahead of landmark elections due to take place on 30 July.

I cannot imagine why this is not intuitively obvious to people all over the globe. If you give people guns, there will be violence, chaos and a lack of stability. if you give them bicycles, society immediately moves towards a utopian ideal. is this so hard to fathom? in the same manner as gyroscopic forces which provide balance for a wheel in motion, an abundance of bicycles stabilizes a society. it's clear that there is a favorable direction of change that needs to be made.

the whole world bank and imf operation should be taken over by qbp (ed note: quality bicycle products) and a handful of mechanics. bicycles should be shipped by the container load to all countries willing to accept them. people here in the states can be employed in the building, transport and subsequent maintenance of these bikes. is there a downside? not one i can see. it's a works program for us and it sure will work to help them.

some might argue that the existing gangs and thugs are there for a reason. but even if that is the case, and it would take a lot of convincing for me, you're still talking about going from this: (real gangs)

to this: (bike gangs).

and though they may turf your lawn on occasion and call you old man so-and-so, they're not really lowering your standard of living. much. consider the issue. consider ways to help these efforts, both abroad and right here in our own neighborhoods. and finally consider the glorious cause that is reshaping the nature of the relationship between cycling and the social order. we hope to bring a new day for cycling, and a new day through cycling. join us in the vanguard of change.

- - - posted by scott

commentary | news | open thread | propaganda

7/15/2006 11:01:07 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

7/16/2006 3:49:04 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

>>>If you give people guns, there will be violence, chaos and a lack of stability.

I dunno. Give a man a fish, he eats for a day, but give a man a fishing pole, it's no guarantee he'll start wearing khakis from the Orvis catalogue. I wore a blue helmet with that well meaning international body, the UN[ction], and did some peacekeeping gigs in a couple particularly nasty places. I got the impression from a couple of these places that the people were pretty violent, chaotic and unstable without the guns, the guns just gave them a more efficient way to go about being violently chaotic and unstable. Take for instance Rwanda, where the weapon of choice in the genocide of a half million or more was a machete. I tend to think the evil stems from man's nature. Some of these places, the hatred goes back to an almost genetic level. You want to eliminate the weaponry, after guns, machetes, baseball bats, golf clubs, and rocks, you'll be reduced to dashing people's teeth out and pulling their fingernails, so much do they hate each other, sometimes for known and good reasons, sometimes for bad and inchoate ones. Those little fang-y eye teeth we have weren't evolved from eon's of peaceful human grazing on the veldt.

I still strongly support the effort to give out bikes, however, and will probably try to donate my old Kona to Bikes for the World. Bikes empower poor people to make a living in the non-subsistence economy and are a great economic boon, and there's a good case to be made that bad economies (including idle hands and economic desparation problems) contribute to societal violence.

Given that bike riding is a social good for so many, and given that the UCI is under great fire due to the doping scandal, one wonders how long before the UCI chips in with its own "EPO for Ethiopia" effort. If a little bit of biking is good for peacekeeping efforts...

Jim

7/17/2006 9:22:05 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Jim,

you raise a good point. there's no doubt that the rivers of animosity run deep. it's almost part of their cultural identity. (i.e. what are we? we are not them. we are everything they are not. they are everything we are against. their existence is an insult to what we are. their eradication is our raison d'etre. let's roll)

I have two relatives who do a lot of relief work under contracts with various aid agencies. they have said something similar, but they describe it as a bit more complicated. it's not quite so clear, more like the nature vs. nurture conflict. (you can't put kids in a skinner box so you can never quite determine the answer to the question.) many ethnic groups, in many parts of the world seem to hate each other. but could they co-exist? we'll never know because arms and money keep flowing into those areas. the current blowout in lebanon and israel is the same, but orders of magnitude larger. that was the gist of my post but i doubt i made it very effectively.

it seems like we cynically shrug, figure they are destined not to get along, and then ignore the fuel that makes the conflict worse or allows the detente to continue. we'll never know if they can co-exist peacefully unless we create a peaceful situation. but we won't creat a peaceful situation because we don't think they can coexist. it's a wierd piece of circular cynicism. and the cynisim amongst those who are not part of the populaiton is just as entrenched as the perceived blood feuds are within the populations. if there was an easy solution, someone would have figured it out long ago.

can you shoot me an email at some point so I can contact you? i could not find contact info on your blog.

-sg

dullandboring |dullandboringAT NOSPAMracingunion dot org

7/17/2006 1:22:50 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Mmmm. Smart people understand a lot hinges on culture, but culture change is hard to achieve. I think Attaturk sort of managed it, the U.S. pulled it off in post-WWII Japan, and I knew a Bio PhD who kept talking about changing cultures in his lab. Otherwise, I don't know of too many successful efforts. Even the really draconian and hard edged efforts to lead culture change often fail - people still referred to English towns by the Anglo-Saxon names nearly 500 years after the Norman invasion and subsequent re-naming of the English countryside. Fighting factional violence in Africa or the Balkans or ME by cutting down on arms sales seems to me to have the same prospects as putting a band aid on a big cut, it may work for a while but as soon as the band-aid is pulled, it is likely to start bleeding. Maybe people just have to come to a realization on their own. Kind of reminds me of the War on Drugs...

Jim

7/17/2006 1:50:11 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)

Jim,

I agree on your point, but all the changes that you brought up were changes that were forced on a population. in general terms, I would agree with you, but in short, that wasn't quite the tree i was barking up. i was coming from the point of view that you _can't_ have change unless you make the conditions conducive to it. I might agree that the chances of change are not good, and i would have to agree that many people consequently don't see the effort as being worthwhile. but i think it's inescapable that if you do nothing, the situation can't possibly improve. it might take generations for people to come around. they'd have to forget why they hated so-and-so, they would have to have some alternative way of defining their identity.

I'll throw out an example. it's not perfect but i hope it illustrates the point i'm trying to make. there have been many attemtps to regulate alcohol and tobacco consumption in this country. I think prohibition is the consummate example of a zealous few trying to changes people's attitudes and behaviours. because it was forced on a population that did not want it, they pushed back hard against it and it eventually failed. but look at tobacco regulation. in a climate where less and less people are smoking, it is becoming increasingly easy to regulate it's use out of public areas which will continue to marginalize it. fewer and fewer teens ever start to pick up the habit so there will be fewer and fewer adults to ever fight to keep it around. where prohibition failed with a vast, sudden change, the effort to end tobacco use gradually is making undeniable progress. a generation from now, there should be fewer users.

and this was my point. we probably would have failed at just outlawing the cultivation and use of tobacco. but by slowly building a body of evidence about it's inherently harmful effects (before the current war on empirical evidence really got cranked up to speed) we were able to create a climate where it's at least conceivable that tobacco use could wither away to a tiny fraction of it's current level which is a fraction of it's previous level. it's gradual change but it's very significant.

I was just reading the story of the star bellied sneetches by doctor suess to my son the other day. it seems to describe a lot of what we are talking about. the will to change (on a populaiton level) has to come from within the population itself. there has to be a realization that the "old ways" were not helping anyone. but if we fail to work to create an environment where this epiphany can take root, we are essentially mandating the status quo.

-sg

dullandboring |dullandboringAT NOSPAMracingunion dot org

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