Christmas season is here: a time of drinking stale eggnog, receiving oversized clothing from your extended family, and almost getting run over by bikers at William and Mary.
Although crazy bikers threaten everyone, the danger that bikers pose to the elderly is particularly acute this season because the country's aging population is out defending us during the "War on Christmas." In this battle, the weapons are Starbucks cups, and the first line of defense is the elderly.
Now, if you are a fan of generally useless statistics, you may know that there are 9 retirement communities in Williamsburg, and the number of old people here is rivaled only by the "returns" line at your local Kohl's. Unfortunately, the bikers on campus are reckless and stop for no one, which includes the elderly (a group not exactly renowned for their agility). This means that they are constantly threatened by bikers as they pass through the William and Mary campus on their way to do old-people things, like voting and eating dinner at 3:30 PM.
In fairness to the students here, bikers are only most of this campus’s transportation related problems, not all of them (see my first column). And in further fairness to students who bike to class, they aren’t all the problem either; the professional bikers dressed like mobile billboards in skin-tight clothing are just as bad.
(If the Village People were bikers, they would be these guys).
Still, my beef with cyclists is lengthy, like a receipt you from CVS for buying one item. First, they blatantly disobey the rules of the road. Well bikers, there are some laws you can’t break: the laws of physics. I’m no physicist, but basic self-preservation dictate that challenging 3500-pound cars isn’t a wise decision. And challenging drivers on campus, who are usually on their phones, is even less of a good idea (texting while driving is only OK if you’re voting on last night’s American Idol").
(CVS receipt or Martin Luther’s 95 Theses?)
I will concede that my rant probably seems unfounded as most bikers are probably pretty decent people, the type who listen to Coldplay and pay taxes. However, I have no way of really knowing this, as I am routinely cut off by them while they do the YMCA with their left hand to signal to me that they are turning. To further elaborate on why I dislike bikers, here is a rough approximation of my daily interactions with them:
9:45 a.m.: Leave for campus in my car.
9:46 a.m.: Get cut off by a biker.
9:47 a.m.: Curse humanity for the rest of my existence.
9:50 a.m.: Park, and go back to arguing with grandparents on the Fox News Facebook page.
As you can see, this is a cyclical (sorry) battle I face. Another complaint I have is that bikers on campus rarely wear helmets. Now, I like a thrill as much as the next person (sometimes I even go to Costco on the first coupon day), but as someone who has received five and a half concussions, I recognize the importance of wearing a helmet.
I think most people that don’t wear helmets are business students concerned about messing up their hair, although I wouldn’t mind if they were removed from the gene pool. But to everyone else not wearing a helmet: WEAR A HELMET. Many of you own plaid clothing and Birkenstocks, anyway, so you can’t care about how you look that much.
Because bikers are such a threat, I am suggesting some ways to limit them:
1. Make not traveling in the bike lane punishable by death (or as we at W&M say: Intro to Biology).
2. Only allow them to run 5 stop signs per day.
3. Ignore them and go back to arguing with grandparents on the Fox News Facebook page -- the ones who haven't been run over yet, anyway.
