We were lucky enough to have dinner Sunday with Dave Trowbridge, his lovely and incredibly talented partner Deborah Ross, her daughter and friend, Ann Salisbury and friend, and briefly, Steve Den Beste. It was great to talk with all of them, and I walked away again impressed at the luck that I’ve had since starting this through the people I’ve met physically and electronically.
We rode a motorcycle down, since anyone who knows Southern California can tell you how awful the traffic is on the 405 on a Sunday afternoon and evening. Remarking on this, Dave commented that he’d recently seen a motorcyclist die on Highway 9 near his home, and that he’d written about it.
Here’s what he wrote:

Tuesday night, as I drove home from work along Highway 9 in the Santa Cruz mountains, I passed a dying man lying at the side of the road. I couldn’t know at the time that he was dying, although I thought it likely, for his kind die weekly on our roads during the summer. He was surrounded by his friends, and there was nothing I could do, so I drove on.
But the next day, on my way to work, I knew his fate, for where he had lain were the spidery orange lines of spray paint left by the Highway Patrol investigator, and some hyacinths planted in the embankment, surrounded by cut flowers still in the florist’s plastic sheaths, there in the deep shade of a redwood forest where such flowers never grow, much less bloom, except on the occasion of violent death.
He was a young man, I suppose, for his hobby is not for the old. Or, rather, those that persist in it usually do not reach a great age. He was a café racer, or so we call them here in the mountains, naming them for the low-slung motorcycles they ride. If you drive the mountains, you will have seen them, blurred harlequins in their riding leathers flashing by, hugging the center line or even crossing it, impatient with the slower pace of four-wheeled traffic. Theirs is a dance of the physics of untreaded rubber and asphalt, the fragile vector between the inertial ghost of centrifugal acceleration and the pull of gravity, first one knee and then the other almost brushing the rushing road beneath them as they follow the highway’s weaving path in an ecstasy of speed that has no teleology but the moment…

And both his comments and his writing cut close to home, in a way that’s more impressive because usually when outsiders write about something you know you may admire the writing or the ideas, but they get it fundamentally wrong. Dave didn’t (well, the tires have treads…but that’s a nit).
In the last six years, three people (one of whom was a very close friend) I know have died sportriding (riding motorcycles quickly on mountain roads). Dozens of others have been injured, usually mildly, thank Someone. And my partner, my significant other, my fiancee has had two trips to the hospital engendered by her own over-enthusiastic riding.
And yesterday, I was riding hard through the hills above Ojai helping test and review some motorcycles for a friend.
Hang on, there’s a point. Actually, two.
First and foremost, there’s this: People have some right to be stupid. I said earlier:

There’s more, which can be put simply that people will sometimes do stupid or evil things with their freedom. But without their freedom, they will seldom do great things. So by protecting society against one, you also deprive it of the other.

The more we take freedom and responsibility away from people, the less responsible and more dependent people we will help create. People want to be free, they want responsibility for themselves and others. And so in doing so…in banning fast motorcycles, or fast food…you begin to create the rust that will eventually corrode away our society and government. That rust exists. It is deep and powerful. But the metal underneath it…the structural steel that holds our society and the government of our contry together…is still strong.
For now.
The second is that while it’s great to advocate the freedom to be stupid, there is also an obligation to minimize the risks to yourself and others, to act responsibly, in other words. This is a gospel I preach most of the places I go, whether in the shooting community, motorcycling community, or, for that matter in politics and other public spheres. Your actions have consequences on you and on the people around you. And to the extent that you decide to simply ignore those consequences…to ride beyond your capabilities or beyond what is remotely safe for the conditions you are in, or in a way that infuriates the other legitimate users of a road or a community…then you are abusing your freedom, not building it, and someone is likely to take it away from you.
Rights and responsibilities are inseparable. It is meaningless to talk about one without the other: to have rights, implies that you are an actor, not an object.
Actors have responsibility. Period.