There But For The Grace of God Go I

Honda Shadow

Back in Holland in the late nineties a neighbour ordered a motorbike.

It was delivered to his door and he immediately decided to take it for a spin.

I saw him at a traffic light as I walked home in the morning and recognised his bike as a Honda shadow with an 800cc motor.

I stared!

I liked the bikes ...

On my way I met two friends talking about the neighbour with a bike. He had stopped by them complaining about the police following him.

"Don't the police have better things to do than follow a law abiding fellow?" they said he had asked.

They themselves thought the police were better off going after real criminals. That's what the tax payer's monies were paying them for they thought.

I disagreed pointing out that if the police found spending so much time following some law abiding citizen worth the time and expenses, and it is a well known habit they have, then following or putting the law abider under intense surveillance or, in this case, a combination of this and harassment, was the better thing they had to do.

Who knows those police were the criminals the police were supposed to be following.

My friends found that statement comic, and broke out in laughter. I excused myself and headed home as they continued to laugh.

"It's not all the police who are bad!" I called as I went along ...

Dutch traffic police

Later the same morning, we heard a loud crash. Asking around at what the bang had been about, it transpired the neighbour testing his motorcycle out had been involved in a traffic accident and died on the spot.

Eyewitnesses swore he had been murdered because the guy who hit his bike had been eyeing him as he hit him. He had definitely seen him, many swore, but accelerated into him with his big truck rather than stopped.

And we were left to wonder just why the authorities had thought he was such a danger he deserved to be eliminated in this way. He had not done anything deserving of death, not especially while he circled the hood testing his bike.

Traffic violations cannot be considered crimes and he did not commit any that day.

He had not been speeding. We would have heard his 800cc motor rave up had this been the case ...

He was not running red lights. I know this myself because when I saw him that morning he had stopped at one.

Motorcycle accident at a traffic light in Holland

He was actually killed at a traffic light when he gave gas after the lights turned green for him and the killer's turned red.

We turned around and went on with our lives ... as people are wont to do even when the danger to their lives lurks given the organ they had made to allow them to let their kids out to play had become a danger to them and needed their immediate attention.

Plausible deniability had become too much of a burden I guess.

I have to admit my knees were weak and shaky for some time after that. I felt a lot that my own freedom from harm had been diminished greatly by that event for there but for the grace of God went I, and I wasn't wishing this on myself.

I could not help but wonder ... maybe I felt this more than many of the docile others who behaved as though they were powerless in this incident, and many other cases where they knew whodunit ... they maybe did not see this issue needed to be rectified ASAP or how, that the only way to prevent a repeat was to refuse to go about life as usual like nothing had happened as soon as they were exposed to such a case where it was painfully clear who had done it and that they were entrenched in an organ they the people set up and fund.

This is why a bunch of people can take over their social organs and get away with running them to the detriment of all and in this you can say said people are tacitly complicit in crimes committed by the same cabal against them and others outside the group ...