The self, the others, and the next election.

You are on a bike path, crossing a river, to get to another path, and another crossing, to get to work after five miles of enchanted exercise and good air. You do this daily, back and forth, impressing yourself and your family and your colleagues who prefer arriving to work with their skins unblemished. You even brag that sweating is natural, and healthy.

You can do this forever, you think, until one day you come to a dead end, a closure up ahead  you could not have anticipated, something you never read about in your local papers because you no longer read your local papers or any papers. The bike path stops abruptly, and there is no way for you to continue on your way to work.

You think, what the @?

How are you going to get to work under these conditions? Your wife and kids took the family car. You can't even call work because you are stuck in the semi-wildness that is your bike path, a wildness you and your friends fought hard to achieve by parading your bike at every council meeting for the last five years, a wildness that  lacks cell towers, or even old fashioned call booths, and that's just how you and your bike friends liked it.

You retreat, down the same path, until you get home, call work, and try to remember where to catch a bus that will take you downtown, and then transfer you to another bus that will take you closer to work. You walk to the bus stop in a bad mood. You do not know whose fault this is; and your plans to bike to work have to be reworked. You think about this all day long.

You had invested five years of your life to fight for your health, your environment, your right to say where and when services were or were not needed. You had made passionate statements at town meetings when mayor candidates talked about urban development, infrastructure, accessible services. You stood there, among people whose bottom lines were profits and urban expansion and talked about the future, about the children who will appreciate open spaces, and the ability to walk to and from school on their own, the way you did as a child.

Today though, your politics may change.

You are forced to use public transportation and suddenly you realize how substandard, clunky, old and dirty it is. Today, as your freedom is restricted, and your mood suffers, you think of how you might afford another car for the family, how you will miss the birds, and the flowing waters under that bridge and the future happiness of days spent to and from work over that enchanted bridge you have come to love.

Today, your focus has taken a sudden turn. All day long, and after dark, you think of nothing else but the need to build a more reliable, efficient public transportation system. Today, you grow up to think for a group, for those who have no choices but earn a living by hopping  on the bus and trudge through town the only way accessible to them. Today, you have left your self behind, and you are thinking of the need of the many.