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Round And
Round by Gary Lee
Wells |
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I
dressed for the winter weather and headed for the lake two blocks away
through the As I walked down
the incline I wondered what we would argue about today; every day was something
different. Vic left little
to wonder. As I reached them
Vic grabbed the half-smoked cigarette from his mouth and asked what I
thought about the new helmet law for bicyclists. “That’s some real shit,” he
said. “The government
dictating this and that.” At first I
thought so many kids would not be hurt in bicycle accidents. I did not tell Vic, though; he
seemed adamant in his position.
He was right, too, in a way.
Parents should know that if their kids get reckless on their bikes
they may get hurt. If they
want to protect their kids’ heads from potential danger then, by god, it
should be their option to buy a helmet; not be given an ultimatum by a
bunch of pencil-pushing bureaucrats to wear on or get
fined. Ron asked if I
ever wore a helmet as a kid.
I did not think so.
Hell, I was not sure they even had bicycle helmets when I was a
kid. “Maybe, just
maybe, the helmet manufacturers are old college chums of the Senator who
wrote that bill,” I
said. “Can you picture
legislators forcing everyone to wear helmets so their old buddies can make
a killing selling them to the public?” “Yeah,” Vic and
Ron chimed in unison. “And what about
those abortion clinic bombings?”
I asked. Their eyes lit
up at the mention of the recent bombing. Vic grabbed another cigarette from
his pack and lit it with the one he had been sucking on. He flicked the used butt on the
grass which drew a disapproving glare from Ron. I began to wonder how a guy who
chain smoked could possibly care about any god-given free will. I guess we had the free will to
commit slow-motion suicide, too, if we chose. I went on about
the bombings. “Here are
people who claim they’re acting in the name of God. They feel they have to stop
abortion because it is murder, . . . and it may very well be. But how can a sane man justify the
stopping of murder by murdering someone else? Didn’t God give them the same free
will to choose whether they want an abortion or not?” I watched out
the corner of my eye as they nodded eagerly. I know they wanted to cut in but I
was not finished. “You know,
if I didn’t agree with abortion I could do a lot by making sure my wife or
daughter didn’t get one; tell them why I feel the way I do; educate
them.” Vic said it is
the same as the helmets. “The
government or some crazed, bomb-toting fool trying to take away our free
will and they have no right.” Ron and I
agreed. We walked on in
silence a while letting it all sink in. I wondered why the three of us
cared anyway. Here we were,
nothing better to do than pace around the lake talking about issues that
were out of our control. We
were all older than any man had a right to be. We would be leaving this life soon
and if he younger generation wanted to bomb each
other into extinction, so be it. If one thought
about it long enough, I am sure we would conclude that we were taking
lawmakers’ free will if we said they could not make laws anymore. It is all a vicious circle, like
the path; we start off meaning well and only end up where we
started. I thought about
that wise king of thousands of years ago. Did he not say it was all
vanity? We live. We work. We raise families. And for what? We are all going to die soon
enough. I was glad to
see the knoll come up in the distance. I was getting tired and told my
philosophizing companions that I was going to go home. When I reached
the top of the knoll I looked over my shoulder. There they go, Vic and Ron, round
and round ‘til they come back to where they started; making a lot of
headway but never really
going anywhere. Just like
this vane life; round and round and never really going
anywhere. Copyright 1996 All Rights Reserved | ||
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