by Sonny Barger
That got me to thinking. Which is the more sophisticated device, the gauge or the thumb? I’d say the thumb—by far. The thumb is what separates us humans from machines. The body is a miraculous piece of equipment connected to a mechanism far more advanced than the biggest, most expensive supercomputer ever built. I’m talking about the human brain. We’re lord and master over one of the most miraculous machines, our bodies.
What attracted me to riding motorcycles in the first place was that nothing else so seamlessly combines machinery with the human body than riding a motorcycle. Every so often I need to remind myself about how the synergy of the brain and the body relates to the mechanical world. William Burroughs referred to the body as a “soft machine.” It’s the highest piece of technology we’ve got. Take care of it, and use it, and most of all listen to it.
43
Discover Your Limits by Exceeding Them
How much is enough and what happens when you’ve had more than enough?
One of the first day jobs I had after I dropped out of high school was working at the Granny Goose potato-chip factory. My sister got me the gig. Outside of the chance to meet a few of the factory girls, the job was mostly a drag. I’d ride my motorcycle to work. All night long we’d fill giant cylinder containers with potato chips and stack them high. But I did learn one important lesson.
I happened to love potato chips, and Granny Goose makes the best. You haven’t lived until you’ve had a hot, fresh potato chip just out of the fryer, before they’ve been sorted, salted, and seasoned. I could have eaten a ton of them.
One day I tried to.
You’ve heard the saying “Too much of a good thing…” Well, double that. Apparently, the guys I worked with had shared the same experience. As they watched me indulge to excess, they already knew what was going to happen. It was something I would have to learn on my own. By the end of my shift, I’d eaten so many potato chips I was ready to puke. Nobody warned me. I think that was the whole point of the lesson. You have to learn about your own excesses by yourself. We all have different ones—be it food, alcohol, drugs, gambling…hell, the list could go on and on.
I would go on to have the same experience with other excesses like cocaine and cigarettes. Eventually, I figured it out. When you love something so much, and you have a seemingly endless supply, and there’s nobody willing to jump in and save you from yourself, in the long run you’re being dealt a favor. Sometimes we need to go completely over the top to find out exactly what constitutes enough, or for that matter, too much.
I don’t use cocaine now, I don’t smoke Camel cigarettes anymore, and I don’t eat too many Granny Goose potato chips. I’ve had my fill. I experienced my limits, and as a result, I no longer have the slightest desire to overindulge in those areas. I learned something valuable that nobody could have taught or explained to me in a million years. By finding out on my own what constitutes too much of a good thing, I eliminated the temptation and the attraction of excess forever. I now know the meaning of the word enough, and I stick to it.
44
Quitting Time Is Not the End. It Is the Beginning.
Sometimes it’s not a good idea to persist. Sometimes it’s better to quit while you’ve got the legs to walk away, quit while you’re ahead, as they say.
While I’m well known for riding a Harley, I’ve got nothing against cars and trucks. I’m just a far better rider than I am a driver. All my life, I’ve managed to dodge even the craziest drivers on my bike. Riding comes natural, but driving to me is a chore.
I remember talking to an older bike-rider friend of mine, a woman. She dramatically informed me that she was selling her Harley. She’d recently had a couple of close calls on the highway on her bike, experiences that spooked her, robbing her of her confidence and poise. Even so, I think she was looking for me to try to talk her out of selling the bike. But I wouldn’t.
Doing what you love includes staying on top of your physical game and knowing when to walk away. As we get older, reflexes slip by a fraction of a second. Unfortunately, a fraction of a second is all it takes to end up spread-eagled across the highway, collecting gravel and road rash. In the past, I’ve seen quite a few bike crashes. Many of those accidents resulted from momentary lapses of concentration or ability.
I could have told my friend to tough it out, to hang in there and keep riding, but that’s what she expected to hear from me. But as a friend, I put it to her straight. Clearly, her confidence was damaged beyond repair. She was now a danger on the road, to herself and to others. The highway was trying to tell her something. She needed to listen. She didn’t need me handing out bad advice.
My response took her by surprise. Then I gave her some names of a couple of ladies I knew who were looking to buy a nice bike for cheap.
A while later I ran into her at the auto parts store. She was buying truck parts. She’d sold the bike and now she was driving a small Ford pickup. She was holding her small granddaughter by the hand.
“Sonny, you were right. I’m glad I sold the bike. I miss it sometimes, but now I have other obligations.”
My friend had accomplished something important. She figured out the best time to throw in her hand and fold.
45
Individuality Is the Most Precious Freedom
Do you believe that an almighty federal government poses a potential threat today to the basic rights and liberty of ordinary citizens?
If you do, you’re not alone.
Every man and woman has the right to live their lives their way so long as they don’t interfere with the equal rights or safety of others. Property rights and the right of self-ownership (which means, literally, owning yourself ) are the core of my beliefs, and if I’m reading the Constitution of the United States right, they are the basic principles of being an American.
As an American, I do have the “right” to pursue an education, own a house, apply for a government subsidy, or seek protections installed by the government for my businesses, but I don’t choose to use these services afforded me because I value doing those things myself.
When I hear the word rights, I think in terms of an individual’s right to pursue his own life and liberty and to own property. Not the “rights” that I am due from the government.
What worries me most about America now is how our government fights crime. I see detecting and prosecuting crime as primarily a local function, not a national one. While I may not like the police force, and I don’t, I understand that each community maintains a police force as part of a program to provide basic city services (even if I choose not to use them). A national police force treats me and my problems like a case number. Individuality is gone.
The concept of law enforcement has taken an evil turn over the past few years, since 9/11. Even before 9/11, law enforcement had strayed from being a city-and state-run function to an enormous federal endeavor. Before the era of homeland security, ask yourself, How effective was the FBI and the CIA in working together? There are now over fifty-two federal government agencies whose employees have the power to carry a firearm and arrest people.
Freedom and liberty, as we interpret them in America, are young concepts in historical terms, under three hundred years old. What bothers a lot of people, especially those in the Middle East who hate Americans, is that we Americans seem fixated on individual rights and liberty. Yet I find our freedom relative. By relative, I mean, it all comes down to how much or how little the government has on you. It is possible to live outside the law, but once “they” have you on their radar screen and you require their subsidies in order to survive, you’re a marked man.
One of our most basic constitutional rights is the freedom of association and assembly. One way a bureaucratic government agency can gain more control over an individual is to limit who they associate with. For example, the first thing a parole officer or a judge might slap on someone like me is a nonassociation clause, which specifically states, as a condition of my release on parole, who I can an
d cannot associate with. Granted, parole, from the standpoint of personal freedom, is like still being in prison. Yet I’ve had judges tell me that they would release me if I promised not to associate with my friends who ride motorcycles. I told them where to stick it. I’d rather remain locked down in jail than live under such a restriction. Who you associate with is a very powerful aspect of your life, and don’t think the powers that be don’t know that.
Too many laws are passed every day. It’s all these new rules, regulations, and the bureaucracy that are bogging us down, whether you’re riding a motorcycle, hiring someone at your company, or adding a room to your house.
Back to the basics. And the utmost, the bottom tier, the foundation of the American Constitution, is freedom for the individual and his right to exercise it in any manner or form that he pleases so long as he doesn’t infringe on the rights of others.
46
My Body Is My Business
What do motorcycle helmets have to do with freedom?
I can’t think of a better way to exhibit the relationship between my personal liberty and government intervention than by bringing up the issues surrounding the motorcycle helmet laws in America. It’s a fight that riders have been involved in for many years. And we’ve fought it alone. The motorcycle companies have been conspicuously absent. Once, when I was testifying in front of a committee of the California state legislature, one assemblyman threatened to introduce a bill stipulating that “only Sonny Barger be required to wear a helmet.”
I’m hard-pressed to find a more freedom-loving bunch of people than motorcycle riders. Motorcyclists in general are a segment of American society that is not fond of big government, especially when the government dictates what we must wear on our noggins while riding. It’s hard to find any wisdom behind any government agency picking a fight with motorcycle riders. We stand up and fight for what we believe in. We attract attention. We’ve spent years lobbying, demonstrating, and opposing legislatures across the country who try to pass laws that have to do not only with helmets, but with how we choose to modify our motorcycles.
You’re probably thinking, What’s the problem with wearing a helmet? Just behave, wear one, and shut up. My main point of philosophical opposition is the principle of personal freedom of choice, and simply put, I don’t like being told what and what not to wear while riding. Riders hate helmets for a variety of practical reasons: reduced peripheral vision and hearing, increased wind shear and weight, heat buildup, and uncomfortable chin straps.
In our attempts to fight helmet legislation, we’ve endured just about every trick that arrogant big government and special interests could pull. The cards have been stacked against us right from the start. Universal mandatory helmet laws were favored by the big insurance companies, who were better served by reducing the number of motorcycle riders on the road. In every state that has adopted a helmet law, ridership dropped from ten to twenty percent. It was easier to reduce the pool of motorcyclist targets than to educate drivers on how to avoid hitting us. And since the medical profession owes its livelihood to the insurance companies, it seems to me that the doctors turned out to assert falsely that helmets effectively reduced accident injuries.
During the early 1990s, the feds blackmailed those states not enacting mandatory helmet laws by limiting their share of federal highway funding. Fortunately, a Harley-riding senator, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, rode to the rescue and helped to repeal that foolishness before California knuckled under.
The overall picture is pretty confusing and discouraging. Out of fifty states, only four—Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, and New Hampshire—are one hundred percent helmet-law-free. Of the remaining forty-six states, nineteen have full helmet laws, requiring that all motorcycle riders wear helmets. Twenty states have helmet laws that exempt adult riders eighteen years or older. An additional seven states require riders between the ages of eighteen and twenty to wear a helmet.
Sound perplexing? We haven’t even talked about what constitutes “approved headgear” and “safety helmets” and in which state. Every time you ride cross-country, unless you’re an expert on helmet laws, you may find yourself pulled over for noncompliance. Because of differing state regulations, technically, riders could be required to pack different varieties of helmets in order to comply with each state’s different helmet law.
It all adds up to one government-meddling mess.
So what does this have to do with freedom for Americans who don’t ride motorcycles? Besides the waste of taxpayer dollars instituting and enforcing these laws, the bottom line is this: you’ve got a segment of society willing to accept responsibility for its own actions and safety. Nobody’s more aware of the safety factors and the dangers involving motorcycle riding than motorcycle riders themselves. Yet why do big government and special interests persist in forcing their wills and agendas onto a slice of the population who are so notoriously freedom loving?
The irony is that I choose to wear a full-faced helmet. I often wear one (though not all the time) in order to control the dust and airflow, since, after having throat-cancer surgery, I breathe through my neck. I consider a helmet to be a necessary riding accessory. A lot of us do. No cop had to tell me. No politician had to pass a law forcing me. I figured it out for myself.
The debate over helmet laws is a classic American struggle over individual freedom and self-determination. I believe in a rider’s right to choose. How free are we, really, if government and corporate special interests insist on usurping the responsibilities that we already accept in the first place? Maybe you don’t ride a motorcycle. Wherever your interests lie, and whatever you choose to do for a living or for pleasure, I hope there’s no government or law enforcement agency looking over your shoulder, telling you how and how not to enjoy yourself or further your enterprise.
When I think further about the helmet laws as a very good example of big-government intervention, many other things about our bodies come to mind—like suicide. If I choose to take my own life, why should the government have the right to intervene? This is wholly an individual’s decision: no one else can make it for him. And yet there is the government stepping in and making what should be a simple sacred act something that is unlawful. And it is only here in America, the land of the free. Once again, death is big business here. There is a statistic that is staggering: over seventy percent of the medical bills you have your entire life are spent during the last two months of your life. And guess where all that money is pouring? Into those cute little pharmaceutical conglomerates.
If I want to live in a high-risk or dangerous situation, I don’t want the government telling me, first, that I can’t and, second, that if I choose to, then what I should or should not be wearing. It is up to the individual to determine all of that. Anything that affects me and my well-being should not be something that is imposed on me by my government.
47
You Gotta Learn to Listen, You Gotta Listen to Learn
Are you listening or just waiting to talk?
One of the by-products of losing my vocal cords is that I had to reinvent the way I communicated. Most of us just open our mouths and talk away. But after my surgery, I had to learn to vibrate the muscles in my throat in a special way before I talked. Talking now requires the use of one hand, one thumb, trapping air over a plastic valve placed in my throat, so that I’m able to vibrate a muscle that forms words. It took a lot of time and work to get the hang of it. Now it’s a natural process, a more exacting process that ultimately enhanced my communication skills. But who would have thought? Not me.
One of the side effects (and benefits) of relearning to talk was relearning the whole process of communication. My method of talking now requires a whole extra step, but it has given me another dimension to the act of communication, and that is listening. Now, when somebody’s talking to me, I not only hear the words, but I study faces, mannerisms, and since I intentionally hesitate a few moments before answering, I find that I’m able to think a little more
about what’s behind the words people say. My level of comprehension has increased. I’ve become a more succinct communicator. I say what I mean, I mean what I say, and I don’t run off at the mouth.
The next time you’re in a discussion with someone, before automatically responding, stop for a moment. Slow down the process and force yourself to think before speaking. Mentally compose what you want to say, and then express it carefully. Don’t answer so darned fast. Don’t interrupt, and try not to talk over anyone (though sometimes there’s no alternative). Become a true listener, both to the words being spoken to you and to what’s behind the words of the person communicating with you.
Devote your full attention to the person you’re talking to. Don’t slight them by being distracted by other people in the room. Make them feel special by looking them straight in the eye.
If I regained my former voice tomorrow, I know that the qualities of being a good listener would stay with me. I would still look people in the eye, give them my full attention, and reap the benefits of winning the fundamental respect of the person I’m communicating with. I hope you don’t have to lose your vocal cords in order to become a better communicator and listener. All you have to do is remember to stop, look, and listen. Think and then respond.
48
Sitting on the Fence Is for the Birds
I started challenging the corporate slave state early on in life.
