YOU’RE DEAD
right, Mike, and to see how us old tappet-heads look after our cars and how carefully we drive them, should be enough to convince anybody with
half a brain that we aren’t the problem here. Thing is, though, half a brain is a lot more than what’s housed in the melons of a vast percentage of our law-makers and policy advisors. How on Earth an insurance company (the TAC down here in Victoria) can get away with forming road safety policy is absolutely beyond me, and yet successive governments and police-force management teams have allowed it to happen.
Meantime, we’re the ones driving the cars that really stand out from the crowd, so we’re the ones who are most visible. It’s why we have to take a personal stand when we see somebody doing the wrong thing; because it’ll come back to bite all of us, not just the dickhead minority.
I reckon this is maybe the key to smoothing the waters for car enthusiasts; a bit of self-policing. If you see somebody leaving chalkies in a suburban street, take the time to suggest they go elsewhere (where nobody can see them) to do that stuff (see previous letter). Or better yet, join a car club with a competition calendar and get it out of their system the safe, legal way. Same goes if you have a mate who’s dodgying the entries in his club-permit logbook: Have a quiet word, because if enough lunkheads get caught cheating the club permit system, the law will have no hesitation in pulling our cheap historic-car rego from under us.
Exactly what we do about the majority of dopes who view driving as a pain in the butt, necessary only to get them where they’re going, remains a mystery to me. But if we keep ourselves nice, they’re one group who won’t be writing outraged letters to the local member about us. What I’m getting at here is that the various tiers of government these days are so completely and utterly populated by vote-grabbing morons, that the absolute best thing we can do as a group is keep our heads down.
You only have to watch the six o’clock news to know that a few dills doing skids in a suburban street will soon have the TV channels coming up with outraged headlines and then interviewing the equally outraged locals and the coppers who will inevitably vow to get tough on hoons and crush their cars. Only problem is, Ma and Pa watching the telly each night don’t differentiate between those hoons and us. We’re all car-dudes, so we’re all tarred with the one brush. It ’s just like the current media war on African youth-gangs.
Yeah, sure, some of them are car-jacking mums and grandads, but others are doing volunteer work in nursing homes. To say they’re all just troublemakers is anything but fair.
On a lighter note, I noticed you used the expression “nuph-nuph”. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but I was once told that the term was derived from police radio-code, where a NUPH was an individual who Needs Urgent Psychiatric Help.