May the Health Be With You

There are lots of reasons to ride and I'm sure I'll cover a lot of them in due time.  But for me, one of the best reasons is to stay healthy.  There was a time in my life when I wasn't very healthy.  I wasn't fat or entirely out of shape.  I played soccer and could run just fine.  But it would hurt.  I got shin splints.  I would be sore after games.  I didn't even realize at the time that all this was a product of being out of shape.  Finally, I decided to make a change and started doing a spin class on top of the soccer.  I slowly dropped some pounds and got faster on the bike and on the soccer field.  I didn't hurt after the games.  I could hike for hours without getting tired or sore.  When I moved, I started riding my bike regularly.  Eventually, my commute consisted of about ten miles of riding.  At this point, I could ride 50-60 hilly miles at a quick pace without a problem.  I would ride to parties up in the Berkeley hills (see photo below for views) and people would be shocked and comment on how "intense" I was.  But it was just something I enjoyed.  All of this isn't to brag or anything remotely like that; as a Minnesotan, it's not in our nature.  It's more to state that just about anyone can get to this point.  Riding is easy to start and the more you do it, the more you enjoy it and the easier it gets.  To me at this point, stopping riding seems harder than starting.  If I go a few days without being on a bike, I can start to feel the difference and feel sluggish and anxious.  Your body needs regular exercise to keep in shape.  Without, you'll just start to fall apart, simple as that.
If more of us rode bikes or walked to get where we need to go, we would save billions of dollars in healthcare costs.  Ailments and conditions wouldn't magically go away, but many of them would be significantly lessened.  Even small amounts of activity count for a lot if you're currently not doing anything.  Say that instead of driving that half mile to the grocery store or your friend's house, you walk instead.  By walking there and back you've walked about 20 minutes.  The CDC recommends that you get 22 minutes of exercise each day, so by simply walking that short distance, you're done.  It's really not hard to get enough exercise each day, you just have to make the right choices.  I love riding to get that exercise and feel so much better for doing so.  I guarantee, start getting exercise and you will, too!

If I Don't Have it, You Shouldn't Either

And now for something different! All my posts except the intro have focused on bike stuff. Well not this one! The Bay Area recently endured a BART strike. BART employees were striking for a number of reasons, but chief among them were salary and benefit concerns. Basically, BART wants the employees to contribute more to pensions and healthcare and doesn't want to give them significant raises. When topics like this come up, you hear all kinds of arguments. The type that always surprise me are basically the equivalent of, "Well, I don't have ___, so why should they get ____?" You can fill in the blank with "pensions", "health insurance", "decent wages", "vacation days", etc.

In this case, employees wanted raises more in tune with the very rapidly rising cost of living in the Bay Area. Rents have been soaring in this area on top of big jumps in other cost of living factors (gas, food, etc.) over the past few years. BART employees haven't received raises in several years (since 2008 I believe) under efforts to cut system costs during the recession when ridership dropped significantly. Well, now the Bay's economy is doing well again and BART is seeing record ridership and surpluses. Now would seem a good time to reward the sacrifices and hard work of employees with long-overdue raises, even if only to reflect cost-of-living increases. In light of this, BART employees asked for a 23 % raise over several years. BART countered with 8 % with several ridiculous conditions (such as lower numbers of employees taking federally protected family leave).

This gets me to my original thought - I've heard several people who are otherwise very liberal comment that BART workers don't deserve these salaries. Yes, I agree that for a mostly unskilled job, they receive a pretty high salary, but that's exactly the point. We should be fighting for living wage salaries for everyone regardless of education level or "intelligence". BART employees average base pay in the $60-70,000 range (before overtime and benefits). In some parts of the country, yes, this would be a large sum, but in the Bay Area, this is just barely a living wage for a family, and probably isn't even depending on where the family lives. And when BART managers have an average salary of >$300,000, the disparity becomes even greater. Yet, here even normally pro-labor people have been critical of the BART workers.

As a defense of this viewpoint, it was referenced that teachers don't make nearly what BART workers do in many cases and work super hard at very skilled jobs. Yes, that's all true, and my counter would be that the BART workers shouldn't get less, the teachers should get more! Yes, teachers work super hard and are in many cases grossly underpaid but that doesn't mean that BART employees don't deserve a living wage, too.

The same holds true for other benefits such as health care and vacation. I never understand arguments that suggest that somehow some people shouldn't get generous health care or vacation benefits (often those in the public sector) because other workers don't. Again, the flip side here seems like a much better alternative - those with good benefits should keep them and those without deserve more than they currently have!

What this often boils down to is a case of those on top pitting those below against each other. The managers at BART like to report employee salaries as a total value of salary, overtime, health care, and pension benefits. This is a pretty deceptive way to report this, since almost none of us think of our salaries inclusive of those extras (though it's important to consider these too). By doing so, the managers, who already make FAR more than all but the richest of us, are trying to deceive us into thinking that the BART employees are overpaid. The rich seek to avoid class warfare in the traditional "rich-vs-poor" sense, but seek to pit the poor and middle-class against themselves. This allows them to continue robbing the piggy bank while we're all too busy surviving to notice. But we have to pay attention and hold them accountable and one great way to do that is to refuse to turn against those just looking for a living wage like we all deserve. Myself, I strongly support the BART workers!  For more commentary on this topic, browse on over to the following article which gives some valuable points:  http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=11574