Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 5     America's road rules: might makes right
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I could have exacted revenge on bayonet-boy by setting fire or slashing tires, and maybe another man would have, but I never retaliated against him. Others yes, but him no, and I don’t know why, except maybe he was Allison's brother, or maybe a simple lack of opportunity. He later won an award for artistic achievement, and a scholarship for academics … which proves assaultive people can be totally normal and talented, yet triggered the next moment by whatever feelings run their impulses.
   
Throughout my teen years I continued riding a bike, seldom taking the bus to or from school. I liked the winter cold and summer heat, and disliked the conformity of the bus so I walked or rode my bike every day it wasn’t raining.

I learned the unspoken ‘car-bike code’ that demands bicycles stay to the edge of the road, and be given space only by a driver's grace. The code permits drivers to pull out in front of bicycles and push them aside when turning or passing. The code allows drivers to pass and then steer off the road to remind the cyclist he is at their mercy. I saw every human thought from the seat of a bicycle.

I was riding on the heavily traveled main roads at 12 years old. Most roads in those days were a narrow two lanes with a paint line down the middle, and occasionally a gravel shoulder dropping off each side.
 
Road improvements have been astounding over the past 40 years. Shoulders have been added to roads along with turning lanes and better paint marking. There used to be telephone poles right up next to traffic lanes, remember that?

Today telephone poles are pushed way back off the road, and road-signs are installed with break-away bolts down at the bottom. Go look at road signs. Today they are attached at the bottom with breakaway bolts because government statisticians expect cars to run off the road and crash over signs (after crossing the space allowed for cyclists).
 
The list of road safety improvements goes on, but unchanged for the past 40 years is the car-bicycle code that allows cars and trucks to feverishly pass bicycles anywhere, anytime, anyplace, under any circumstance, as near as they want, even on a snow-slick road in a hailstorm.

There are no constrains given to motor vehicles … which in America’s mind, is the high water mark of our freedom. A fact borne out as true since the only ‘freedom’ for Americans today is the privilege to drive around in a car … which, of course, is actually not ‘free’ because of endless charges, fees, payments, taxes and gas.

Nope, there is no freedom left in America. You can’t decide one morning to get up early and ‘walk north.’ Before long, you’ll be walking on somebody’s land and be trespassing. America today has you torted up tighter than cow in a slaughterhouse. They got you waiting to be butchered up for profit.

As I see it, the only American freedom left today is bike riding. You don’t need paperwork or fees or payments or gas. But in exchange for that freedom, society levies a charge; the price you pay for that freedom is danger.

Bike riding remains a very dangerous occupation, or sport, or recreation … and it’s not because riders spill over on their heads. The danger is entirely because motor-cars whirl around the American flagpole as the highest form of patriotism. Car driving is the evolutionary apex of our society, despite every book and speech that erroneously says our greatest American achievement is Law.

When you’re on a bike, the mandate of law does not exist. There is no ‘equal protection under the law’ for a cyclist, simply because the road is ruled by man’s most basic instinct: ‘might makes right.’

Car-world is ultimately ruled by ‘force of weight’ and not ‘rule of law’ … which is why law is just a compromise with human nature.
Chapter 6) I consent to a search
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