It’s a Right, not a Privilege

I’m thinking there are a few people out there who share the government’s particular view on privilege.

This fact never ceases to astound me, since I do not feel remotely privileged by anything the government thinks or does, and in fact, most of the time I’m downright insulted it imagines it can get away with the shit it gets away with.

I had a brief conversation with a bloke in a pub the other day, who advised me that having a motorcycle licence is very much a privilege and not a right, and that being the case, I should get over myself.

What I should have done right then was to hit him in the face with bar stool. But since our every move is scrutinised by CCTV these days, I was the picture of benign restraint.

Instead, I went and told the big Samoan security gronk the bloke was trying to sell me Chinese heroin and DVDs full of child porn. So that was him and his privilege out on the street a few seconds later.

It was a much better resolution. It’s pointless arguing with such a creature. I certainly do engage with them from time to time, purely for the base amusement it affords me, or if I’m bored. But I never change their minds, and I never expect to. I far prefer to belt them with furniture. Or, in these camera-filled times, hand them over the tender mercy of huge islanders one generation removed from cannibalism.

Still, this is not the first time a mouth-breather has put forward this view – that a license is a privilege; we should treat it as such, and get off our hind legs.

Yeah, well I’m on my hind legs.

This ‘privilege’ bullshit is the government’s position. It always has been. Like any ruler of stupid, servile cretins, the government feels we should kow-tow in gratitude because it has permitted us to operate a motor vehicle. You know, to maybe earn an honest living, take the kids somewhere nice for an ice cream, or maybe even take a family member for a dose of beaut chemotherapy because that’s kinda hard to do by yourself if you have cancer.

Now because we are indeed stupid, servile cretins, we’re okay with the government having this position. We even repeat its ‘privilege’ rubbish to other cretins. We actually believe it to be true.

And should we operate this vehicle in a way it doesn’t approve of (like maybe exceed some arbitrary speed limit by a couple of kilometres per hour a few times), then it will rescind this privilege and we can piss off back to our kennels like chastened, and now unlicensed, dogs.

But it is not a privilege to have a licence in this country.

It is an inalienable right. Like clean drinking water, or access to hot strippers.

And it will always be an inalienable right until such time the government can provide a viable alternative to private transport. And that is just not going to happen in my lifetime, or my son’s lifetime, though there is an outside chance some genius might invent a Star Trek-like transporter machine sometime in 2150.

I’m done expecting the clowns to provide the population with decent public transport. I’ve just given up on that, much like the government has.

But until that public transport thing happens, and until the swine in charge pull their greasy snouts out of the many publicly-funded troughs they slurp from and devote some of my tax money to providing an alternative to private vehicles, it can shove this “license is a privilege” paradigm up past its fifth digestive colon.

It is a disgusting act of sick bastardry to just leech money from motorists for speeding offences in the first place – especially when the parameters of these offences are set by nauseating behavioural scientists who treat us like lab rats. If speed was really the overarching monster of death it is portrayed to be, all vehicles would be limited to 70km/h. That they are not is the most revealing aspect of this argument, isn’t it?

But the most appalling aspect of all of this is us.

We have become a nation of bitches. Obedient curs to the snake-oil salesmen we permit to rule over us, and who rule us exactly like we deserve to be ruled – as servile, mewling slaves who are only too happy to give over their own money so that the bars on our shiny safe prisons stay polished.

And quite obviously, the longer we permit this lie of a license being some kind of privilege, the longer we will remain utter bitches, spreadeagled before our masters with our throats eagerly exposed and piss running down our trembling haunches.

It is well and long past the time the government understood that it is enjoying the privilege here.

It is privileged to govern us.

But we have forgotten that. And the government has forgotten that.

Perhaps it is also well and long past the time it was reminded about the privilege we have bestowed on it.