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image credit: samhDOTnet, Flickr
Apparently these graphics come from a Bicycle Safety booklet that was distributed to elementary school children back in the 1950’s or 1960’s. It boggles my mind.
While I am typically not an advocate of re-blogging, reposting material from other people, I’ve been captivated, fascinated (?!) by a set of scanned images posted by one of my Flickr contacts (samhDOTnet) and felt the need to share.
The propaganda – the illustrations and accompanying captions – are nothing short of … crazy, terrible, horrific, mind-numbing, innapropriate, and countless other adjectives that I won’t list. As a child of the 60’s, I remember some crazy stuff from back in the day in elementary school (a booklet I had as a school “safety patrol” crossing guard comes to mind) – but nothing quite like this.
Most of all, it makes me contemplate the evolution of attitudes towards cyclists vs. “the rest” (cars, trucks, rights to roadways, even pedestrians), not to mention the image some people continue to have of people on bikes. And the fact that culpability for cycling fatalities and accidents in this country – for as long as we’ve been sharing the road – is often not well investigated and blame still seems to be placed on the cyclist rather than the driver of the motor vehicle more often than not. It’s a little hard to think about, really.
The entire set can be seen here (if you want to hurt your eyeballs), in his Set titled “A RIde of Death”.
image credit: SamhDOTnet, Flickr
image credit: samhDOTnet, Flickr
image credit: samhDOTnet, Flickr
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