Asking for bike parking = siccing dogs on civil rights protesters, apparently

Neighborhood message boards are pretty useless as a window into a neighborhood, but they are really great for seeing who the craziest goddamn people in the neighborhood are, without having to go to a community board meeting. Take, for example, the case of an argument about bike parking in the street on the Crown Heights forum on the Brooklynian. What should just be a simple matter of discussing the best use of the limited space available to all of us in Brooklyn was quickly turned into a racial conflagration by one of the opponents of bike racks in the street. 

The discussion going on was ostensibly about bike racks getting installed in the street in front of Zelda’s. But then, responding to someone making fun of turning the issue into one that pitted black and disabled residents of Crown Heights against newer residents, a poster responded with the following:

Pitmama i know the screams u would love to silence likewhen u use to silence us with the German shepherds and the water hoses . We really have not forgotten it and we tell our children too

Let us translate that from forum-ese to English for you: because this person is an advocate of replacing some street parking with bike parking, they’re violently suppressing someone’s civil rights. Which, hey, we know that for whatever reason, emotions run high when it comes to biking issues in the city. But this has to be the most over the top rhetoric we’ve seen about it to date. At least until the inevitable day when the opponents of the Prospect Park West bike lane somehow compare it to the Bataan Death March.