Screw It. Let's Ride

I don't know about you, but I'm sick to death of hearing about the recession, about the murders, about the rapes and the burglaries and the Internet rip-offs and the divided Democratic party. I've had enough of the bad news about outrageously high gas prices, soaring food costs and pregnant, drug-addicted, shoplifting starlets. I'm tired of war and hunger and poverty and tragedy. I am sickened when I hear about shady merchants, screwed-up troublemaking kids, cockroaches and rats in beloved restaurants, defective machines and gadgets, and projections of skyrocketing numbers of us who will end up with Alzheimer's if we live past age 80.

Every day is a 24-hour visit to the Disneyland of bad news. It's depressing, upsetting and disheartening to just watch the news on tv. At least on the Internet, you can get amusingly distracted by stories that suggest we are close to teleportation, and that eating chocolate/drinking alcohol/watching tv for 20 hours a day are really good for you after all. We can get diverted from the heaviness of the world by stories about the latest sports scores, or a dog nursing motherless kittens, or that Will Ferrell will be taking over from Conan O'Brien when he takes over from Jay Leno.

Our own lives are challenging enough. I am a great advocate of escape: 300-page mysteries and thrillers, tv comedy-dramas, action-packed movies, plentiful chocolate (or Baskin-Robbins' pralines 'n' cream), long phone calls to confidantes, quick dinners with friends, impulse golf on a weekday, luxurious sleep. And I'm also an optimist. Somehow I do think things will work out okay. A book that inspires optimism and is thought-provoking as well is The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I love the premise, namely that the events and happenings that have the greatest influence in our lives are neither probable nor predictable. The greatest example in recent years is 9-11. Okay, so that's not very uplifting, but the point is that because the biggest influencers in our world are neither probable nor predictable, there's no use worrying about the future. Whatever we're worrying about will probably be trumped by something we have no idea will happen.

I believe in the power of the positive. I sometimes fall into a pit but overall, I think if you keep good thoughts and pictures in your head of what you'd like your life to be like, you stand a better chance of living those pictures than if you wallow in the negative. So I love it when somebody has the balls to go against the popular whine of the moment and take a stand for us as strong conquering heroes! Sometimes I think that people think anyone who's positive is stupid or at least unenlightened. It's much more fashionable to complain and badmouth everyone and everything.

So kudos, I say, to Harley-Davidson. Baby boomers' favorite motorcycle company, the one whose cachet can turn a 145-pound, pale-skinned accountant into an intimidator just by giving him some shades, a leather jacket and a Harley, has a new in-your-face advertising campaign that reeks of optimism. And macho cheekiness.

The print ad shouts: "We don't do fear!" It explains: "Over the last 105 years in the saddle. we've seen wars, conflicts, depression, recession, resistance, and revolutions. We've watched a thousand hand-wringing pundits disappear in our rear-view mirror. But every time, this country has come out stronger than before, because chrome and asphalt put distance between you and whatever the world can throw at you. Freedom and wind outlast hard times. And the rumble of an engine drowns out all the spin on the evening news. If 105 years have proved one thing, it's that fear sucks and it doesn't last long. So screw it, let's ride."

Yes!!!

I will probably never own a Harley or any other motorcycle. But whenever I see a Harley rider on the road, cloaked in a t-shirt or leather jacket with the distinctive Harley insignia on his back (or her back), my heart flutters and some part of me leaps out, grabs onto the back of his seat, and flies away from the ugliness and the weight of the world into some stunning sunset ahead, and freedom! So thanks, Harley-Davidson for this we-don't-have-to-take-it-anymore message. Yes, I'm a baby boomer, and it takes a Harley-Davidson to remind me of my rebellious, adventurous, give-em-hell baby boomer heritage. So screw it, let's ride.