Safe
Meditations on the Helmet Wars
by De Clarke
I was brought up by parents
who lived through World War II, and one lesson I learned from them is very simple:
there is no such thing as Safe. Anything can happen to anyone
at any time. The only thing you have from moment to moment is the freedom to
experience your own life and make your own decisions. It is a freedom you can
lose at any moment, a fragile thing, but the central ingredient that makes any
life enjoyable and satisfying. To be forced to do things takes the fun out of
them; ask any worker whose management penalizes folks who skip the company picnic.
There's a reason why people dislike slavery and seek to escape it, why we don't
like being bullied. Even if the master is kind and the food plentiful and the
work not too arduous, the slave wants to run away; we thirst for autonomy, for
self-determination, for not being ordered around by bosses and masters and Big
Men. Or even by faceless bureaucrats or smothering nannies. It doesn't have
to be complete autonomy; most of us can deal with prohibitions on harming others,
if we are just allowed to make the ordinary decisions for ourselves, the simple
ones like what to wear and what to eat and what to do for fun and whether to
go out for a walk... and the big ones as well, like whether to permit ourselves
to be kept alive on life support machines, or whether to go through the hell
of surgery and chemo and radiation if the odds of survival don't seem worth
the misery.
In any society that claims
not to be fascist or dictatorial, we should have a right to make those kinds
of choices. We should not be forced or bullied into anything for our
own good, only out of harming others.
In my lifetime I have seen more and more fences go up, more and more warning
signs, more and more absurd product instructions written for suicidal idiots
("Caution: do not attempt to carve meat while rotisserie is in operation.").
I have seen my world become more and more like a kindergarten for backward children.
Yet at the same time I have seen more and more dreadful risks undertaken in
secretive and colossal arrogance. I have witnessed an endless, mindless search
for ultimate personal safety, in bewildering parallel with the grossest stupidity
and the most obviously dangerous and destructive social behaviours.
It makes no sense to me; and the mandatory helmet laws seem to me just one more
symptom of this very grave social problem; our unwillingness to look squarely
at the real risks and dangers, the outright madness of our time -- and the accompanying
tendency to bully and blame and enforce conformity on others, using fabricated
or grossly exaggerated dangers as our righteous excuse.
We beat our kids, and criticize our neighbour for his unpainted fence. We agonize
over a half pound of weight gain, and are sure that global warming can't really
be such a big deal. We make sure to be terrified of people of colour, certain
that they are all dangerous criminals; and we trust the inside traders and S&L
sharks who steal our life savings. We scrub our toilet bowls and sinks until
they shine like hospital equipment, to preserve ourselves from germs and disease;
and the cleaners we use are toxic. We're so terrified of Communism that we stockpile
enough nuclear weapons to kill every person on earth ten times over. We're so
terrified of disease that we demand (and prescribe) antibiotics for every little
sniffle, thus steadily weakening the effectiveness of antibiotics and blithely
inviting the next truly serious epidemic. We recycle every scrap of paper in
the house, then drive our SUV to the park with our bikes on top of it. We engineer
a "Green Revolution" to feed the masses, and in so doing destroy the farmland
and the biodiversity humanity needs to survive. We fear body fat more than starvation.
We smoke cigarettes, and we call the helmetless bike rider reckless. We drive
cars, and we call bicycles dangerous.
People. You go figure.
© De Clarke
see also Fear Culture and Staying Cycle-logical