Spectator Australia readers will remember the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy. The editor titled the piece, This is Freedom. In it, I described the cold tyre plunge down Bray Hill. Race tyres are wonderful things that stick like glue and run out about as fast a tube of glue too. Cold … you are daring the devil. The competitors stay to the right on the drop because it isn’t safe on the left, but they must get to the left to take the hooking dip of a turn at the bottom and being sure to avoid the patched surface on the right. It is a treacherous ride on a motorcycle that is more powerful than most cars are.
Just after that turn, they hit a spot called Ago’s Leap. The great Giacomo Agostini was so fast he turned a rise there into a jump and it was named for him in the 1960s. Last year, four riders died at Ago’s Leap when their sidecars were hit by a crosswind that lifted them into the surrounds. This is freedom.
The families, though, were stoic. They loved their sons and their sons loved the TT and knew the risks. They hark back to earlier times when people could take life on the chin and not weep that they had lost everything. Consider the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires. Reporters at the time were able to line up people standing in front of burned-out ruins of farms and properties who said things like, ‘It’s a bit of a mess but we will get it cleaned up in a day or two.’ Here is today’s sandwich of misery and they just thought they’d eat it up one bite at a time. Compare that with climate activists that wail to the cameras as if they have lost everything.
I wonder if there is some type of capture that has happened with the public of today where people have been encouraged by media to perform for TV? I feel certain the earlier example would uphold the traditions of the Anzacs. With the current generation, you would not give them a bath toy let alone a rifle lest they hurt themselves. This weak moral spirit has stolen Australia and it is time we took it back.
I mentioned sandwiches and could not name them correctly because this is a family magazine read by civilised people. Roughneck terms for the horrors that management drops on them are not civilised enough for this, but some will know what I was saying. This is basic-level stoicism. The response to any disaster is to say, ‘I love it.’ Yes, it happened and I am alive and in it and I’m doing well thanks very much. Is the government elite mantra of people being downtrodden and victims just a way to crush the human spirit? I think it is. Crushed people will easily accept that the government cares for them and wishes to keep them safe and they need to be kept safe. The free will be offended that anyone, much less a bureaucrat, thinks that they are good enough to even say such a thing. They will say: ‘I am free, know my own business and you are government maggot.’ How times have changed since Australian Rules Football umpires wore white and were known by Aussie slang as maggots… The silly thing is that there were umpires then that were respected and known by name. Today, we have four on the ground trying to umpire everything and there is much less play that goes on. You can’t even have a tongue lash at the umpire now without being banned from attending. In the old days, there was a lot of that and the best ones were clever and funny in their jibes too. People weren’t so fragile then.
John Laws used to be a big deal and he gave plenty of air time to the sanctimonious who would announce their brilliance and how ‘they’ should do something about it. It hasn’t changed since then, but social media has given the idiots a much louder megaphone. ‘They’, the government, the bureaucracy, and the various elites with money and time have really taken this by the horns and are busy strangling the rest of us.
There is a problem with freedom. If it was an iceberg sticking out of the sea, the top would say freedom, and responsibility. Socialism’s iceberg is next to it and it says: free everything, health, safety, live forever. The bad guys always get done in by the state. It is the sweet milk chocolate of politics. If people could see the 90 per cent of the iceberg that is underwater, they would find under freedom, liberty, truth, justice, prosperity, success, and civility. Buy the freedom and everything you get is good. Under socialism, they find poverty, starvation, the sapping of the soul, and the massacres of millions. It is all bad and the more socialism you accept the more horrifying it gets. The problem is that responsibility scares people a bit like it scares a child. The paradox is that taking responsibility makes you strong and independent. Someone to be reckoned with.
There is a motorcycle charging down a hill in the Irish Sea. Racing this week. Someone might die. On average a couple die each year. On top of that spectators die as well, but you can’t keep them away. How I hunger to be among them. I was asked once if I would ride the Isle of Man TT given the chance. In a heartbeat I would, I would not hesitate. It is the attraction of a great challenge. A bare-knuckle fight compared to playing croquet. Find out how really good you are. Maybe it is just that you never know how alive you are until you are on the edge of death.
Perhaps that is why the Covid panic ran over the top of everyone so easily? Have we all been so soothed by our easy lives that any risk at all registers as life or death? Is that why people rushed to the arms of government and begged to be safe? Is that why they accused others of being selfish for questioning the dictum in any way at all? Is that why they abandoned the structure of Western Civilisation that had made them free, safe, and prosperous for the lie of government care? This is not freedom.
