The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking

I have hitchhiked many times and I have picked up hitchhikers many times. I have exactly zero stories of the peril it is supposed to put the hitchhiker in or the psychos that are supposed to be trolling the streets looking for people to put in peril. But it's dangerous isn't it? It's something about which there are endless tales of horror! Seems odd that every person I can think of that I have shared a hitchhike with is someone who I think would like to ride with again. Not to toot my own horn, which we always say before tooting our own horns, I think the feeling was probably mutual. They would like to get to know me even better. Cook me a meal, not cook me AS a meal. Take me out somewhere, not take me out. Shoot the breeze with me, not shoot me. It's the simplest thing in the world to create a baseless fear. I am not going to say I don't believe any of the stories about people who were hitchhiking and they got picked up by a lunatic and murdered, but I'm sure it's the one story in a million that gets promoted. I'm sure there have been great partners who met hitchhiking, great ideas that were discussed with hitchhikers that lead to wondrous inventions that help us all, marriages, (not necessarily happy ones but...), that started with a person who needs a ride and a person who has a car and offers a ride in a spirit of brotherhood. In fact, possibly the only person you can pick up or be picked up by who is any danger to you is the kind of antisocial cretin who, if he/she doesn't kill you quickly before the trip is finished, will likely climb to a position of political or business prominence from whence that person will institute protocols and procedures that will kill you slowly anyway.

Caravans, wagon trains and pilgrimages are not a whole lot different. People going the same way and joining up with one another in a spirit of friendship. Sometimes it was for reasons of protection since bandits are less likely to attack a large group of travellers than a small one. How crazy is that? It used to be more dangerous NOT to pick up hitchhikers! If not for hitching up with fellow travellers, we would be without some classic stories from all of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Kerouac's On the Road to Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which isn't one of his better books, I know, and I can't imagine why IT was the one made into a movie, but...

In Cuba you can get two kinds of driver's licence: one is private and it's exactly the same as the selfish, fearful, pass-by-your-fellow-man-hitting-a-mud-puddle-splashing-him-and-laughing kind we get in Canada. The other is a public one. The licence plates are a different colour. With this one you have to pick up a fellow Cuban and drive him/her as far as you can. What the hell is wrong with that? In fact I can guarantee there are all kinds of stories Cubans have of fantastically fun encounters they've had this way. I wonder if there are so many stories of hideous rapes and murders as a result of the public driver's licences. Hmmmm. Guess I'll have to go to Cuba and find out.

But they're evil Commies there aren't they? Imagine the ignorance! Giving someone something they, (maybe DESPERATELY), need, that you have, will not inconvenience you to give it to them and giving it to them absolutely FREE! Why, that's the kind of thinking we oughtta get rid of! Outlaw it somehow. Well, by golly we did! It's illegal to pick up a hitchhiker. It's illegal to hitchhike. Break out the defibrillator and oxygen mask, that fish looks like it can't breathe!!!

Don't take candy from strangers; pretend you don't notice others in elevators on on buses; don't meet your next-door neighbours; don't offer a stranger a push if he's stuck in the snow; don't offer any stranger ANYthing because how are they to know you aren't a deranged madman who wants to make a lampshade out of her/his stomach lining and keychains out of her/his nipples? It's true. They DON'T know you're not a nutjob. But why is our SOCiety so interested in promoting such incredibly anti-SOCial thinking and behaviour? And would I blow your minds, dear readers, if I suggested that maybe the people who are encouraging us to treat everyone like life-or-death competitors are the mental misfits who really should not be allowed into positions of encouraging others to do anything? Well they ARE there and they have been for as long as history has been recorded.

One of my personal heroes, (although he is ANOTHER evil Commie), is Confucius. Kong Qiu. It's pronounced Jyu. How the hell they get a Q in there is just an example of the wrong people promoting the wrong stuff. Capitalists in charge of society will create countries full of people scared of their neighbours, and Chinese people in charge of transliteration will take the letter Q to places it was never meant to be. But how can we get societies in which the right people make the decisions that help all of us? One answer is government. The masses governed by the few. If this idea weren't so vulnerable to greed and corruption in its very nature, I just might vote. Or if we had a dude like Confucius again. In his time the government was corrupt too. Greed and power motivates bad people more than doing the right thing motivates the good it seems. There were all kinds of douchebags running the three families of power in Kong Qiu's day and he knew them all and knew what they were up to. He bided his time teaching wisdom until one of his former students reached a position of power from which he was able to grant Confucius a governmental job where he could make a difference: Minister of Crime. And what a difference he made! He did not just remove the corrupt douchebags from power, he charged them with the CRIMES they had committed against the people for years and he removed them from the earth. He had all kinds of dirty, rotten scoundrels killed. And for a glorious little while, the areas of China he was in charge of were run the way things should be run emphasizing personal morality, even in politicians, social relationships, justice and honesty. Crime rates were non-existent, jails were empty, people were brothers and sisters sharing instead of hoarding, "fair market value" was FAIR, unemployment was wiped out and as if by some MIRACLE, all of this lead to financial prosperity! For everyone! Not just the few at the top! Of course this couldn't last because of that situation we can call "human nature" that leads the Buddhist, and, (like Confucius the Taoists), to believe that life IS pain and suffering, and the situation is simple: the bad guys are just more motivated than the good. So what happened in the case of Kong Qiu was that the bad guys found a weakness in the powerful Confucian disciple who had given him the post. They gave him, I think it was 500 of the most beautiful girls they could find to be his dancing girls, servants and probably concubines. In exchange Confucius was demoted and instantly exiled on fear of death. All of China still knows the mistake that was but like North Americans every four years, that same mistake just keeps getting duplicated. The Chinese Communist Party is the antithesis of Confucianism if ever there was one. The few have all the power and riches and the many have all the character.

The Confucian example, and there are many others we never hear about in our schools, pretty much shoots down every single argument in favour of capitalism. Things like, "Competition encourages ingenuity," "Equality encourages laziness," "Entrepreneurism and financial success should not be punished by taxation," and all these other THEORIES were disproved in PRACTICE. People still worked during Confucius' tenure as Minister of Crime. People didn't cheat each other. Mutual respect was taught to children instead of fear of strangers. And when the kids weren't getting the best grades teachers probably weren't blamed or fired for physical or sexual abuse of the students, the kid was told to pull up his/her socks. I bet kids didn't sass their parents either.

The point I'm skirting is that people who DON'T want to live in societies where people help one another, like a motorist picking up a hitchhiker, are few and far between. But they are the people who have managed to work their ways to the positions of power in our world. They WANT to promote fear of all sorts of things to keep us in our insular, little worlds enabling us to be more efficient consumers who enrich THEM. They demonize communism and socialism because they are about community and society and not about capital. Why does it seem like our owners are so invested in outlawing helping each other and working together and promoting throwing each other under the bus as a way to be successful? Pretty simple: if we work together we can oust these douchebags a la Confucius.

During the New Year's Eve celebrations in Calgary, as it was last year, transit was absolutely abysmal. Buses stopped at 12:30 and taxis were impossible to get. Not hard, impossible. I mean you phone and there is no answer. Because the number of taxis was capped in a year when there were 400,000 people in Calgary, not the 1.2 million there are today and it hasn't been changed because corrupt municipal politicians are being bought by Taxi company lobbyists. Not normal people, assholes who made it to positions of power. After two weeks of non-stop local media griping about it, I said to myself that if I have a vehicle by next year I am going to cruise around Calgary between the hours of 1 and 5 AM picking people up and driving them home. What is wrong with that? It's the courteous thing to do isn't it? But even though the people stranded outside the bars they got booted out of at 2 will be drunk, and about half of them will be male, I just KNOW there will be a ton of folks giving me strange looks, fabricating excuses and reaching for the mace in their jacket pockets saying, "Nah, I don't live far and I'm enjoying the crisp -30 air." or "My friend is sober and is coming to get me but thanks anyway." I WILL get stopped by the cops for suspiciously driving aimlessly around with no business to conduct. And think of all the laws I'll be breaking! I am essentially acting as a taxi without a licence, which I've just explained, is not possible to get. If the strangers feel like they should give me something in return like a few bucks for gas, I am conducting a business without proper licencing. I am soliciting favours not from but FOR private citizens and since every law in existence is but malleable clay in the hands of a "good" lawyer, I'm sure one little word won't make that much of a difference. And I am picking up strangers endangering myself in a way that is a crime against myself tantamount to picking up a hitchhiker so I should be fined or at least removed from the road for disobeying the people who know what's better for myself than I know myself. Meanwhile if it turns out to BE -30, people will be freezing and maybe even dying out there.

Fuck that! This is what our society has come to? It's time for some civil disobedience. I am going to revolt by becoming a gypsy cab, baby! And I may not only do it on New Year's Eve either. I might just continue on for the whole year. And then some! Who's with me?