How often do you consume some post-apocalyptic media and people slog it on empty highways or whatever for miles and miles on foot or revert back to fucking horses for some reason? Like I can suspend my disbelief that somehow there's just shittons of fuel laying around everywhere that magically doesn't spoil for decades but even then there's so many scenes where the characters are struggling to walk a distance or take forever and you could literally do it in a quarter of the time on a bike.

They're comparably easy to fix, they don't require keeping a whole ass horse alive, they're fairly abundant everywhere and the fuel is you. It just fucks with my disbelief. What, do these people walk through what remains of the suburbs, looting houses for supplies and just ignore every bike they see?

  • Mao_Zedong [comrade/them,none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    In the first few years of Nazi occupation in the Netherlands the Nazis took the rubber from everyone's bicycle tires, and people modified their tires with wood . Kids could then still ride them to school. I'd like to see you replace your horses broken leg with wood. Bikes were also modified to generate power for resistance printing presses and to light peoples houses during outages/Nazi mandated blackouts.

    FWIW a little later on in the war the whole bicycle would be confiscated, either for the steel or taken by German soldiers who wanted to flee. It's the source of our national anti-German quip: "give us our bikes back".

    Dutch Jews were never allowed to own bicycles.

      • Mao_Zedong [comrade/them,none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        My great grandpa's brother was a member of the Communist Party of the Netherlands, and he helped spread the communist resistance newspaper De Waarheid (the truth), which were made in part with those modified bikes. He was put in a concentration camp in July of 1944, and executed several months later. He was 49.

        Edit: now I'm on the subject anyway, another brother's son died in a forced labour camp in Berlin, in 1944. It's unclear how, maybe allied bombing, maybe execution. He was 22, and his corpse was found in 1947. His father never fully recovered from losing his son after the war, my dad remembers how he was a sad broken man until the day he died.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Dutch Jews were never allowed to own bicycles.

      When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.