Fighting Back

Fighting Back

AT LARGE

THE ENEMY IS BEING DRIVEN BACK. Slowly, painfully, sometimes in steps so small you can hardly see them, but still, we’re advancing and the enemy is retreating. The enemy is ignorance. Of all the things that bedevil motorcycling, none so consistently ruins it for all of us as ignorance.

First there is Their ignorance. You know who They are: the motorcycle haters, the ones who loathe us and our vehicles with a passion difficult to comprehend. No matter what event, lecture, personal fears or social snobbery drives Them to this state. The root is Their ignorance.

Second, there is Our ignorance. We as motorcyclists are ignorant of many things as we ride through life, but the most appalling ignorance we share is an abysmal lack of education in the facts of riding itself.

You don’t have to be a genius to see that Their ignorance and Our ignorance are coiled together like dueling snakeheads growing from the same body. One cannot exist without the other. And the continued existence of one perpetuates the other.

Clearly, it’s not up to Them to educate themselves about Us. It’s up to Us to get smart.

And so we are. Ever so gradually, ever so incrementally. But like a snake sheds a useless skin, we are shedding the dark ages of motorcycling in which ignorance was celebrated as bravery.

We are not doing it unassisted. In fact, that we are doing it at all is the result of massive social changes over which we have no control, and of the untiring efforts of motorcyclists most of us never heard of. These people are heroes. They deserve our admiration, and our attention when they speak, because when they speak, they teach. And when they teach, they turn a previously ignorant would-be motorcyclist into someone who can enjoy this sport with real understanding of what’s going on.

Most of these heroes work for the Motorcycle Safety Foundation. The MSF is not some super-agency. It’s just men and women like you and me who somehow have decided that there’s more to motorcycling than just taking rides—more, in fact, than just taking. They give instead. Not for free, admittedly. And not without the usual ego-boosts that accompany being an instructor of anything.

Certainly, among the thousands of MSF instructors, there must be martinets who get their kicks from being In Charge. But compared to the value of what’s taught, such petty personality problems don’t matter. What matters is results. What matters is that a rider who takes the Motorcycle Rider Course or the Better Biking Course is likely to be a rider who can avoid the awful penalties of his own ignorance. And on a bike, the penalty for ignorance is often swift and terrible; the margins of safety are slim.

I know a few of these people personally. Some are superb riders themselves, some merely competent, but they all have my deepest respect. Among them are: Lynn Nathan, the diminutive ex-schoolteacher who was formerly program curriculum development director for the MSF; Lt. Col. Bob Cowan, an MSF instructor at McDill AFB in Florida; retired Lt. Col. J.T. Smith, who roams the Midwest as a chief instructor; David Pauli, who runs the Right Track program in Maryland; and Biff Morris, ex-roadracer and current president of the MSLVI (Motorcycle Safety League of Virginia, Incorporated).

Luckily, there are people like these all over the country, people who have seen what ignorance can do, and are fighting it with everything they can muster. Their lot is a frustrating one; not only are they largely unappreciated by Them—the folks who hate Us—but We all too often tend to view them as ultra-conservative, hypercautious safetycrats. Some probably are. But the ones I know are not, and that gives me confidence to suggest that most are not.

More important, they give me hope. As long as I have been involved with motorcycles, ignorance has been the status quo. But I like to imagine the possibilities if the MSF spawns a whole new way of riding: I imagine a nation of riders actually trained in how to ride by experts who are both educators and skilled riders themselves. When I imagine that, I see not only a dramatic drop in tragedies caused by sheer ignorance, I see a changing relationship between Us and Them, a relationship that gradually could repair the social fissures that the very act of buying a bike now causes among family, friends and colleagues.

Yes, there are significant technical developments that will reduce the motorcyclist’s exposure to injury in a crisis on the road; anti-lock braking and new suspension and steering systems will provide better technical margins. But as generations of fighter pilots (to cite an example from the high-risk group most closely analogous to Us) have learned over and over again, hardware is simply no substitute for intensive training. With training, you have a fighting chance. Without it, you’re just fighting chance.

I learned to ride by lurching around Jim Childress’s little shorttrack on a Yamaha YG1 in 1963. On the street, I was on my own. It was the wrong way to start. I learned how wrong as I narrowly escaped the close calls caused by my own ignorance, and I never forgot it.

The right way is the way my son went from zero to competent in a dozen hours of training under David Pauli’s guidance, the way so many (and yet so pitifully few, compared to each year’s crop of new riders) others learn from other MSF people across the country.

I know the arguments against institutionalizing the free-form sport of motorcycling. I know the arguments about costs and examiner competency checks and the rest of it. None of it matters. Only eradicating ignorance matters.

And after that, there’s always stupidity. But not even my MSF heroes can handle that one yet.

Steve Thompson