FREEDOM – AN ESSAY
During the years 2020 and 2021, I wrote nothing at all about the lockdowns. Two reasons: I seldom do politics and, except for wearing a mask when grocery shopping, my day-to-day life really didn’t change. Despite living in government-will-control-every-aspect-of-your-life California, I just rode my bikes whenever and wherever I wanted. Nevertheless, I did give a fair amount of thought to all of the new regulations and mandates.
Now, I’ve often described myself as “Basically a Freedom guy,” so for me, the whole lockdown thing mostly centered around the concept of Freedom. My ruminations got me thinking about a chapter called Crazy Horse in my first book, Freedom’s Rush (tinyurl.com/kmtn7gv), which I wrote way, way back in 2012. (Or was it 2013?) The snippet below, an essay if you will, is from that very chapter. Below that are some Freedom memes. Feel free to pass them around.
When you’re riding, there is this undeniable feeling of self-reliance and self-authority over your own actions, your own life. That pavement rolling by a foot or so under your boots represents death or, at the least, serious injury, so it could be no other way.
True, there are dangers inherent in driving a car but the penalties for making a wrong decision are far less. If you get into a fender bender in a car, you climb your way out of the airbag and call a tow truck; on a bike, someone else calls an ambulance and you might spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair. This is the reason bikers have, or quickly develop, a sense of self-reliance and self-authority.
Self-reliance and self-authority are vital foundations of true freedom. To get there, the only two factors to resolve are who has authority over you, and on whom do you primarily rely, you yourself or someone else. When you’re on a motorcycle, there’s really no choice. You’re either self-reliant, assume authority over yourself and keep riding, or eventually land in the hospital at the mercy of doctors and insurance companies.
This is not to say that we never accept or offer help. We do and we do it a lot. But when we accept or offer help, it’s never at the expense of our own or someone else’s self-reliance or self-authority. The reason it’s like that is because the help we give and receive is done with no enforcement. We help because we want to, not because we have to. And therein is the essence.
When help is freely proffered, it works and works wonderfully, for both the giver and receiver. It’s fun and satisfying. When help is enforced, however, it may work but only temporarily. After that will come an inevitable decline of morale and an inevitable increase of resentment, fraudulence and bigotry.
In his marvelous book Twelve Against the Gods, William Bolitho wrote, “We are born free as eagles, yet we are cursed to stay and dig.” Stay and dig, indeed. Holding down a job or two or three, going to meetings, paying taxes, paying bills, paying back loans.
Add to it all those things others persuade and require us to do, plus the unthinking enforcement of ever-growing and unnecessary laws and regulations, and we have a society in which there is a constant undermining of self-reliance and self-authority. Perforce, our freedoms constantly erode.
So what do you do? The government is not going away and neither are your creditors. How do you escape this endless digging? Well, one perfect antidote is to be a motorcyclist, a rider, a biker. (Fortunately, it’s still legal.) It’s a simple solution that sounds simplistic, and perhaps it is, but it does work. The only proviso is keeping at it.
But what of this assumption of self-authority and the common laws we must obey? Bikers and other freedom-loving people recognize that laws exist and that many of them are good ideas. Stop at the stop sign, don’t cross the double yellow line, don’t park in the handicapped zone.
But while we admit the existence of those laws and the usefulness of many of them, the inherent hazards of riding a motorcycle, and by extension the inherent hazards of freedom, real freedom, are such that many of those laws simply are not necessary for us.
That’s not to say that we defy the law. Well sometimes yes, but what I mean to say is that we don’t violate the reasons, the underlying concepts, for the laws.
It’s not a matter of operating outside the law. It’s a matter of being so free and responsible that we don’t need the law.
FREEDOM MEMES
The Johnson River Bridge in Alaska. The Johnson River is 150 miles southeast of Fairbanks and is just one of about 12,000 rivers in Alaska. Its source is the Johnson Glacier. After coursing only forty-one miles, it empties into the Tanana River.
Highway 50 in Nevada. Highway 50 is known as “The Loneliest Road in America” and it may very well be. What you see here — no people, no vehicles, no animals, hardly any desert plants — is typical of the route.
A road somewhere in Georgia. This was the photo I used as the cover for my second book, Freedom’s Rush II. (tinyurl.com/upwadyv)
On the Alaska Highway between Nenana and Healy. Does it look cold? Hah! Tell ya what, I started thinking I had arrived at my demise!
Just a dirt and gravel road somewhere in Kansas.
A sunset that literally filled the sky, east to west, north to south. This was about twenty-or-so miles west of Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. Maybe my all-time favorite photo.
On the Alaska Highway in Alaska just over the border from Yukon. Think it was also cold that day? Man, oh man! I believe I’m still recovering.
South Point, the southern-most spot in the United States, on Hawaii’s Big Island.
The Beast taking a breather on Highway 17 next to Soap Lake in Washington. Exactly how does a lake get the name Soap? Alas, I’ve no idea.
