I ride Critical Mass because it feels good to do something in face of 3,000 daily advertisements hammering me to be a better consumer and thus continue to deplete the Earth of any & all resources. I ride to keep my sanity, to do SOMETHING, ANYTHING to demonstrate my feelings that the Twin Cities' car-centric culture is killing this Earth and destroying our society of peoples.

The history of social progress is punctuated by small groups of concerned, determined people who had to 'bend the rules' a little to achieve their goals. The very principle of direct action involves 'enacting' laws that don't yet exist. When African-Americans first entered into Woolworth's lunch counters during segregation, they were acting as if the world were the way they wanted it to be. Clearly it wasn't, and they were (especially initially) arrested, abused, and generally mistreated.

At the time, moderates claimed that it would be more effective to play by the rules, using officially sanctioned methods to accomplish social change: litigation, legislation, media work and policy advocacy to shift 'public opinion.' Earlier, abolitionists were accused of being too radical, angering the entrenched power structure--and, in fact, of 'setting the cause back'.

And it is indispensable, but not sufficient. Progress that has been made--whether in civil rights, environmental protection, economic justice, etc.,--has never occurred without a group that pushes harder, that reframes the questions and recenters the debate, that occasionally acts 'as if' what they wanted to be true were true. For me, this is the role Critical Mass can play. I do not ride with Critical Mass (necessarily) to make a good impression on people, to convince drivers of anything in particular, to 'advocate'. I ride because I find the mass a place where bicycles do have the right of way--and not just on paper; a safe, quiet, clean, and fun use of the public good, the streets which we all pay for and the air which we all breath; a place where the rules are designed for bicycles, not cars.

To quote Chris Carlsson, one of the early instigators of San Francisco's Critical Mass: "We conceived Critical Mass to be a new kind of political space, not about PROTESTING, but about CELEBRATING our vision of preferable alternatives, most obviously in this case bicycling over car culture."