LFP => $$$

I heart the lakefront path in Chicago.

But, seeing as I use it so much, in all types of weather in all seasons, I feel territorial about it. It's cumbersome to me to weave around slow-moving bikers; for me, the path is a bike highway--not for Sunday drivers. But I deal. I am always surprised when there are droves of runners, which I forget happens every nice weekend in the summer--especially in the early-morning hours. But I deal. Pedestrians are my least favorite variety of LFP (ab)users, especially tourists who are out for a leisurely gambol. Some of us are late for work; you'll have to excuse our speed.

And some of us only have one speed; mine is ~20mph.

On Friday night, I had the night tour. We had 30 people but I was training another guide, so the student-teacher ratio was a more manageable 15:1. [For the record, I have total confidence leading a group on my own--up to 30 but not over.] And as we rode north on the LFP by Oak Street beach, there were a new variety of pedestrians clogging the LFP: hundreds of disillusioned minority youth, in groups of 5-15, engaged in whatever sorts of in-group / out-group antagonism that are trendy these days. Not that I felt too threatened--for myself or for the tour--but I was annoyed at their slowness, their lemming-like groupthink, and complete disregard for other users of the path.

But maybe I should have felt unsafe. The past few weeks, as I've "home" on the LFP, I've noticed a stronger police presence. This weekend (Memorial Day), I've seen marked and unmarked cars, and roving gangs of bike cops. It's like the Jets and the Sharks out here. And apparently, they are there in response to angst-fueled youth riots like the ones that happened on Wednesday. Granted, only 22 people got arrested. This isn't large-scale--yet.

The other clear problem with disaffected youth is that they leave the beach TRASHED. Friday night, the beach looked as bad as Grant Park after Taste of Chicago.

Why can't we all get along? For me, on the LFP, the simple answer is that we're all moving at such different speeds. How can I, on my bike going 20mph, effectively navigate through a mass of inconsiderate boobs traveling at near tectonic speeds.

I think of this as a metaphor for the economy. What if the ratrace really is a race? As we're running along, the only other competitors we care about are the ones just ahead of us and the ones just behind. The people limping along 10 miles back are of no concern; the people 10 miles ahead we can just barely see.

On the path, I am the clear winner--the Warren Buffett--and everyone else is just in my way. Having a bike is like having an education--a tool to a better (faster) life. In the real economy, I feel uncompetitive, or more like I am choosing not to compete or choosing not to see it as a competition. And yet, I'm still stuck on the racetrack, worried more about the soundtrack to the journey than getting to the destination first.

[The whole lakefront path experience, and the thoughts and feelings it arose in me, made me think that maybe affirmative action should focus more on geography than race. The economic segregation is a bigger problem than racial segregation: it's so easy to confuse them because most poor neighborhoods in Chicago are Black, but not all African-Americans are poor.]