Bike For Democracy

Last year, Mike Sowiski and Brianna Cayo Cotter were sitting around with a group of friends talking about the upcoming election. Brianna had been out of school for two years and had just returned from Europe, where she’d been working as an organizer. Mike had been coordinating a literacy program in Loraine Ohio, near Oberlin College where the two had attended college. It was a crucial year to get involved in politics, the two, along with a group of their fellow students and friends decided, so why not do something to get more of their peers voting? As we know now, this group was not alone. All around the country young Americans from all walks of life were cooking up ideas about ways to get involved. The key difference: Most of these groups weren’t plotting to forge a path across the entire nation, nor were they planning to do it all on bicycles.

Recently, WireTap spoke with Mike and Brianna about Bike for Democracy, the cross-country, non-partisan bike tour to register young voters that the two will embark on next week, along with a crew of their peers. The group plans to leave from Portland, OR on August 12 and will stop in upward of 100 small towns and cities between then and Election Day. Along the way, they’ll help with registration efforts and promote voting rights and protection and they're planning to document the process using on video and audio, as well.

WT: Why a bike ride?

Mike: There’s something about physically using one’s body to move across distance that’s very meaningful and I think also empowering. Nobody who’s doing the trip has actually done anything like this.

One of the things that’s going to be really good about our trip is that just by necessity, we have to stop in many places where a lot of campaigns and mobilizations won’t stop.

Brianna: When we looked around at a lot of other voting initiatives we noticed that they were centered in urban areas…and that’s great but you also lose a lot when you only go to big cities where there’s already a lot of support. We wanted to try to do something which would overlap with those urban centers, but which also was hitting really small towns and cities of smaller sizes that don’t get enough attention.

We’re also in this situation where everyone is telling us what America is and what it stands for, today, and we wanted to find these things out for ourselves, rather than letting other people dictate that. And one of the reasons that war is being fought today is oil. So it also seemed like a good thing to promote biking as a sustainable form of transportation. We’re all in our early 20’s and it’s good timing. When else can you take off and ride across the country?

WT: So, you’re also planning to document your journey. Can you say more about that?

M: What we want to do it get a real dose of what real people have to say across the trip – particularly youth – about government and politics. And you know, while I have a sense of what that is… I think it’s going to be a reality check to talk to young people across the way. Because the stereotype is that the young are disaffected, they don’t vote, they don’t care, or they’re misinformed. Unfortunately, we also carry those stereotypes, as young people. So I think it’s going to be really powerful to try and break through some of those, and to put people in front of a camera or a microphone and ask them, “What do you think?”

I’ve met young people who are Republicans, I’ve met young Democrats, I’ve met Anarchists who don’t want to be part of the electoral process because they think it’s so dirty to begin with. But I want to hear more about what people have to say. I don’t think we want to posit ourselves as the knowing what youth in America think, but I think once we’ve made this journey we’ll know a whole lot more.