Bike Talk: Car Advertisements vs Bike Activism

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In a recent media uproar from GM's ad targeting college students to "stop pedaling...start driving," GM got pretty whipped by the bicycle community and activists. As a backlash against the ad, I informed some followers via Twitter to write GM about their "creative" division between bike and car culture. Although this did help to get GM to apologize and change their ad, many of us weren't going to stop there. For example, Giant bicycles, a large bicycle company, created their own ad countering GM's mockery of cycling (photo above). Although this is badass and many were talking about how appalling GM was for this, I wanted to take it further. 

As with most things, I think it's necessary to call out the bullshit created by car culture. For a starter, GM has a large hand in history and present in its development of the destruction of our environment, economy, labor, along with the exploitation of sex, women, natural resources, and poor laborers. You may not see it the way I do but if you can try to understand how advertisement and corporations work, you'll see. GM also has a hand in the intoxication of soil, water, landfills, and is listed on the top of 1 of 20 of 100 corporations listed as the worst polluters of the environment (source). Let's take it further - Did you know, last year, our government settled with MLC (New GM) for them to pay 773 million dollars to clean up their act? Great one may think but realistically it's going to take them decades and trillions to save the environment they damaged. They can keep trying to look innocent by developing hybrids and cleaning up sites but where does that landfill from demolition go? Whose cleaning it up besides poor laborers who will be exposed to those intoxication's? I dare those CEO's and executives to go out and do it themselves.

I know it's no fun reading about the injustices that exist among us created by large corporations such as GM but it's seriously time to wake up and fight back the corporations that attack bicycle culture, our environment, and the lives affected by it's forces. Cycling activism never meant staying pretty on a bike and raising a middle finger to car culture. If we want to break it, the way it breaks us, we have to expose its dangers, disasters, and manipulation in our politics, environment, and lives. I think it's time to start raging against the man or machine, don't you?