All Rights Reserved © 2013 Thomas W. Day
On my usual mid-week trip to the library, I got stopped by a Ramsey County Sheriff's Deputy. As usual, he asked, "Do you know why I stopped you?" I did not.
"You crossed the white line to pass that van on the right." Fortunately for me, the deputy was a good guy (and a motorcyclist) and he let me go with a warning. All the way to the library and through the rest of my day's errands, I thought about what kind of goofy state has a dumbass law like that. Keeping in mind that I believe every state in the nation, except California, is barely sophisticated enough to bang the rocks together in a primitive attempt to communicate -- because of the national ban on filtering and lane sharing. Holding a motorcycle behind a stopped vehicle seems outrageously and unusually primitive.
I can just imagine our hillbilly state representatives creating this idiotic law and including all vehicles in it because one of their inbred offspring blasted by a stopped vehicle that suddenly turned right and tagged the passing vehicle. The obvious "solution" is to create another dumb law to regulate all of the stupid products (cages) and every other vehicle on the road because you never know when the next "special" child will take himself out of the gene pool.
It makes sense to hold cages to the no-passing-on-the-right rule because the damn things are too fat to fit in that small space, even on the freeway. But motorcycles and scooters? That's just stupid. If I'd have been on a bicycle, that would have been the lane I'm supposed to riding in. Does the law insist a bicycle stop in the same situation? The last place I want to be is stuck between a cage sandwich because some hillbilly lawmaker can't tell the difference between a motorcycle and a cage.
Like the ban on filtering and splitting, the fact that a rider can get a citation for saving his own life when one braindead cager slams into another on the freeway or any other place designed to stack up traffic irregularly, this is a dumb law. Aerostich's Mr. Subjective optimistically would like to believe that laws only reflect what the majority of the public is already doing, but anyone who observes traffic in neighborhoods where the "no left turn on red" or various misplaced stop signs have been randomly distributed without rhyme or reason knows that laws are self-perpetuating and lawmakers are a species unto themselves.
In case you're confused about this rant's title, the "stupid products" I'm referring to are cages, cars, single-passenger four-wheeled fuel-and-space-wasters. I have always believed the passenger car is one of the dumbest, most wasteful, most harmful inventions in human history. Anyone with rudimentary mathematics skills has to despair at seeing miles and miles of single-occupant, gas-guzzling cages stacked in congested parallel lines, draining our children's futures and destroying this version of the earth and current life forms for no good reason other than we all dislike each other and can't be bothered to use mass transit. Cars are for people who aren't competent on two wheels.
Likewise, the existence of handicapped parking is irrational. Everyone who drives a car is, obviously, handicapped. Those flags we hang from our windshield mirrors are just identifying those who are incredibly handicapped as opposed to those mostly handicapped. I know that from experience: for three months post-hip-surgery, I used one of those special parking permits because I couldn't get from the bedroom to the bathroom without a walker, crutch, or cane (in that order as my healing progressed). I was trapped in my cage, with my wife driving for most of two months, because I was incapable of riding a motorcycle. Now, I'm better and I don't need the damn car. If we had a civilized public transportation system, I wouldn't own one of the damn things. For those rare moments when I need to carry stuff larger than my side-cases, I'd rent a car or take a taxi. I hate being required to own a cage and am about 90% of the way convinced to move somewhere I won't need a car.
But what really twists my chain is being limited to the handicapped center-lane on a motorcycle because the dimbulbs who make the laws can't tell a handicapped vehicle from a motorcycle. Making the rules the same for all means of transportation is as stupid as punishing everyone for the sins of a few. It would be really nice to be a member of a society that makes laws to reflect what the public does, but I don't see that happening here or many places. A couple of years ago, a kid who was a wannabe cop asked me to list laws that I thought were irrational. I named about a dozen in the few minutes we had to talk. A day later, I emailed him another couple-hundred irrational laws that came to me after we'd talked. A few weeks later, my list had grown so large that I had to give up the whole project because it was taking over my life. Our legal system is downright depressing, when you take time to think about it. It long since has given up pretending to be a justice system and, now, just masquerades as a police state employment-bureau-for-the-mentally-handicapped while exercising its primary function as a tax collection system.
When I move into my cave in Montana, you're going to hear the verse from one of my favorite Bobby Dylan songs coming from dim light that will be my gas lantern. "You ask why I don't live here? Man, I don't believe you don't leave." There will be only one law enforced from the entrance to my cave: "Get the hell out of my yard unless you want to be picking rock salt out of your lame ass!"
MMM Winter 2015
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