Every now and then, I do something “risky” and illegal, to remind myself what it was like when we were still relatively free.
I roll one of my old bikes out of the garage and take it for a ride around the backroads near my place without a helmet on.
This used to be legal, once upon a time — on the sound premise that it was your head to break and so your business to risk it. Then it became the business of busybodies and control freaks — aka, “the government,” which passes laws that assert the contrary.
It is important to keep this in mind. That there is no such beast as “the government.” It is a term of manipulation only; a technique for getting people not to think about what government actually is — which is a proportionately small number of busybodies and control freaks who have acquired control over mechanisms — physical and economic punishments — which they use to busybody and control us.
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They are — for those who get the reference — Mrs. Kravitz, the nosey next-door neighbor from the ’60s TV sitcom, Bewitched. Only armed and very dangerous. Mrs. Kravitz was the object of ridicule; the armed busybodies and control freaks who constitute “the government” are a mortal threat if disobeyed.
My riding around the backroads near my house on my ’76 Kawasaki Kz900 — one of several bikes made long before the country went on regulatory lockdown and people were still largely free to do as they liked in terms of everyday life — is in and of itself now an offense.
Which is to say, actionable.
Even though I have harmed no one — and even though my riding sans a helmet poses no conceivable threat of harm to anyone else— an armed government worker (the agent of the control freaks and busybodies who constitute “the government”) will fix his sights on me and use the threat of murderous violence to interrupt my ride and then filch my pockets — the proceeds going to fund “the government,” including the salary paid to the proxy enforcers of the control freaks and busybodies who constitute it — to punish me for having the audacity to not place a helmet on my head.
Thus it gives me a very special kind of illicit pleasure to ride without one. To feel not just the wind on my face but the load off my back. What it Used to be Like is brought back to life, however fleetingly. It is very much like the smell of something triggering an ancient memory only better because rather than a memory this is actuality.