Peanut the Squirrel and the Coercive State

Although we’re well into our 70s, my wife and I still greatly enjoy riding our motorcycles. We’ve ridden long enough — and known enough other similarly dedicated riders — to appreciate the potential dangers. As the saying goes, when something goes wrong on a motorcycle, you’re “very close to the scene of the accident.”

While we understand, sadly, that no precaution can protect against the worst case scenario, we are sensible to the value of trying to protect ourselves against the lesser events. We never venture out of our driveway without the “second skin” provided by leather or Kevlar fabric — we’ve both seen what “road rash” can mean. And we always —always, always — wear full-face helmets. (READ MORE from James H. McGee: Is Walz Vanishing in Virginia?)

I’m often appalled at what I see other riders wearing, the men in their T-shirts and shorts, the women sometimes in bikinis. However much they wish to project a “cool” image, to me that simply looks ridiculous. But I reserve my deepest ire for those I see riding without helmets, or wearing some of the ridiculous little devices designed not for protection, but simply to get around laws requiring helmets to be worn. I know a little bit about brain injuries, and I think that riders who fail to take even minimally reasonable precautions are simply idiots.

You may then be surprised to discover that I am also adamantly opposed to helmet laws. As I said, those who fail to wear good helmets strike me as idiots, but I believe that the proper solution lies in persuasion, not in legislation. I’ve heard all the arguments, many times over. Someone who survives an accident with severe brain injuries becomes a burden on the health care system, both practically and financially. That burden on the taxpayer gives the state an obligation to protect them from themselves.

The same argument can be heard about many other activities. Extreme sports, for example, such as mountain climbing, or even less extreme sports such as skateboarding or snowboarding, or skydiving. Skiing gets a pass, it seems, partly because it’s so widely popular, partly because it’s chic, still regarded as the province of the “beautiful people,” or at least the wannabes. Nonetheless, the skiing accident deaths of the famous, Sonny Bono, for example, or Natasha Richardson, sometimes provoke a spasm of calls for “enhanced safety requirements.”

One need hardly add that the same goes for activities such as smoking; noxious, to be sure, deeply unhealthy, but still, one would think, a matter of personal choice, at least to the extent that one controls for the effects of second-hand smoke.

Yet one now reads of measures proposed — and then rejected — in New Zealand, to effectively ban all cigarette purchases, starting with young adults and carrying forward, with a rolling requirement, until all cigarettes have been banned. A similar measure, even now, seems to have captured the support of the new Labor government in the U.K.

Prohibition, then, is precisely the right word, even though it’s association with the notoriously failed alcohol prohibition in the 1920s makes America’s current crop of busybodies squeamish. That too was promoted as society looking out for those incapable of looking out for themselves. But the impulse isn’t simply about forbidding certain activities.

Our recent experience with Covid serves as an object lesson in the active imposition of “health and safety” mandates. The most visible of these was masking, widely required despite the lack of evidence that it made a difference in the spread of the disease.

The most notable of these active requirements, however, was vaccination. One doesn’t have to be an anti-vaccine fanatic — I’m not — to recognize that putting the full authority of the state behind forced Covid vaccination represented a form of tyranny, one scarcely justified by the unproven efficacy of the shots. The same with the lockdown regime, with all its destructive effects, above all on schoolchildren.

The ever-insightful C.S. Lewis once observed, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies…. those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Busybodies and the State

The curse of our times, and very much the curse of our current politics, lies in the rise of these moral busybodies, and, above all, of their insistence on capturing the powers of the state for the purpose of imposing their beliefs upon those around them, filled with the conviction that they act for the good of all, without allowing the rest of us to decide for ourselves. We see this from the climate change fanatics — can there be anything more terrifying than a world obedient to the fever dreams of Greta Thunberg and her ilk? We see it from those P.J. O’Rourke famously christened as “safety Nazis.” We saw it with Fauci and his many acolytes.

Most recently, we’ve seen it in the sad tale of Peanut the Squirrel. Peanut, a pet squirrel and his companion, a pet raccoon, had become cherished internet figures. But then, acting on an improbable rumor that the raccoon might have been rabies infected, the New York State health authorities invaded their owners’ home, conducted a five hour search that would have done justice to a raid on a meth lab, and then ultimately took the animals away and killed them. (READ MORE: Hurricane Outrage: Where is Harris?)

This is the health and safety busybody impulse elevated to sheer madness. But Peanut and his friend may not have died in vain. Their martyrdom has now captured the internet, and has even become an election theme. In the admittedly unlikely event that the Democrats get a political comeuppance on Tuesday in New York State, one might reasonably believe that the state-sanctioned murder of Peanut will have played a part. We’ve already seen widely-distributed internet memes featuring the Gadsden “Don’t tread on me” flag with the coiled snake replaced by the image of a squirrel.

Rest in peace, Peanut — this morning I pray that your sacrifice will not have been in vain.

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A forthcoming sequel finds the Reprisal team fighting against terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges across the globe. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.

 

 

 

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