Life can be confusing. And never more confusing than when hypocrisy and lies are blended with facts. The latest pogrom against people who live a biker lifestyle is one of the things that adds to my own confusion. I remember the 1970’s when bikers loved motorbikes and parties and mostly worked hard and had families. The clubs didn’t initially go underground to service their organized crime pursuits. They went underground because they were on the ends of another irrational culture war by police and the community. There are whole sections of our lovely little community that foster malice toward anybody they feel is not like them and a whole media industry that justifies the space between advertisements by feeding that malice and giving it direction

The latest series of attacks on bikers by police and governments is an attack against a culture and not at all about crime. The fact is that in Australia more units of organized crime and drug gangs have been busted in the last ten years than in the first two hundred years of the country.You wouldn’t think they would be trying to justify ever more draconian laws if it was all about beating crime

Why have I called it perspective on murder. A group of Commancheros murdered a Hell’s Angel at Sydney Air Terminal. The police were strangely absent in a brawl that went for ten minutes. The two club’s high ranking members ended up on the same plane. Coincidental. I believe that the undercover assets of the police had a lot to do with stirring up the trouble and didn’t realize a man would die although I wonder if they care at all. The NSW and Federal Governments have been determined to introduce these laws and really that strangely timely incident at the airport was a bit too convenient.

Over a decade ago the Australian Defence Force stuck a group of their employees into tubs of deadly chemicals knowing they were killing them. The ADF knew that there were minimal safety standards to survive that immersion and because the chem suits were difficult to use and expensive did not supply them (if there were evn such suits available for these chemicals). These people were ordered to enter that immersion or face punishment which could have meant long jail terms and a dishonourable discharge. No pension and no support and no future. All of those people have either died horribly or committed suicide. There may have been hundreds of them. They fought for years to get compensation while the government and ADF held up the cases hoping more would die so they would not have to pay. There has, to my knowledge, not been one ADF boss or politician arrested or charged or lost his job or pension for the MURDERS of those brave personnel. There has certainly not been a total war on the culture despite all that killing.

Again back in the 1970’s, a young man, barely seventeen started a new job for a company at Rosehill near Parramatta in Sydney. It was a factory job, night shift, and as he was shown to the foreman by one of the office workers he asked about the virtual fog of white dust that came from a saw and filled the building. He was shown a small carton of milk and told the dust would wash away and be made safe in his belly by the milk.He actually asked if there were masks and overalls supplied and was treated with a dose of derision that made his ears burn. He was made to feel a bit like a child who was scared by a car horn or a book about cartoon monsters

Every night for about a week he would work as a press operator’s assistant stacking pipe insulators being made for the navy. During the night that saw would run for hours and the entire building was awash in dust. Some of the employees would play cards during their break and the young man never forgot how they seemed to grow out of the mist after the saw was turned off and it started to settle. When the quota for that machine was done the younger guys (there were two) would go and have a snooze in the packing boxes while the machines were set up for another job. They would awake almost buried in white dust looking like they were sleeping in a heavy snow storm. Dutifully, everybody drank their milk during awarded breaks.

The factory was James Hardy. The white powder and all the items in the machine presses were asbestos and most of the men who worked in that place died horrible deaths. I was the young man. The people who ran that factory and made millions from it knew the dangers but elected to keep it from the employees because they didn’t want a general panic and the loss of their entire income. How many people might not have died horrible choking deaths if these men and women had warned consumers and workers they they needed safety gear to handle asbestos safely? When does it become murder? How many of those people who earned all that money knowing they were killing people went to jail or were charged? How many of the hundreds of workers who were poisoned by work practices that included hiding the dangers they faced? I worked in a lot of places where where safety gear was not only not supplied, the dangers were talked down as though they were non-existent and safety gear all but banned. That culture of industrialists who caused all that mostly ended up fat, living in nice houses by beaches, drinking good wine and demanding bikies be wiped out

Yup, it’s a confusing old world if you take the time to actually check it out. ASnd while I have it in mind. How many of the overwhelming number of deaths attributed to cigarette smoking are actually from a generation of workers that worked in some of the most poisonous environments we can imagine?