peoples is peoples

It is a rather different bucket of fish, of course, getting a motorcycle license in Peru. In Pucallpa, for instance, there is the additional requirement of a physical, to determine if you are blind, paraplegic, or a raging drunk. This can, of course, be waived for a small fee – or if the examiner happens to know your father and is therefore qualified to pronounce you a strapping, fit young fiddle.

Next, you have to take a written test. Again, there is a small fee. Being a north American and unable to understand complex written Spanish traffic jargon, you will be allowed to ask the examiner for a restatement of the question, at which point he will say something cryptic such as, “La respuesta para pregunta numero cinco es C.”, which you, being agile of mind, can take to mean that you should check the box next to the big letter “C”.

You pay another small fee, take a driving test (or not, if you know the examiner) and SNAP! you’ve got yourself a license.

This all sounds very corrupt and contemptible, I know. But try, for a moment, to think of it through human eyes. Corruption is systematized and poverty is always hounding at the door, so it becomes very, very difficult not to play the game. While your average Poor Louie must pay bribes to exist, the cops who give the tests aren’t much better off, and they have to be very careful not to set the fees too high, or no one will be able to afford to take them. The masses unable or unwilling to pay test fees can always be caught on the road and forced to pay “paperwork costs”, but the police force is stretched thin and there is only so far you can push an impoverished, desperate people before things start to get ugly. It was not so long ago that being an authority figure of any kind made you a target of violent Marxist terrorist retribution.

Plus, everybody is doing it, and there is really no end to how low people will sink under the guiding light of “everybody’s doing it”. Cheating at business, for instance, or going just an eensy-weensy bit over the speed limit. These are the small ways pretty much everybody fudges the line in North America, where the rule of law is pretty dang all-pervasive. We can sit here all hoity-toity at being born into this place, but the truth is that if you move the line of common, accepted behavior, it doesn’t take too much of a shove for us all to wander into the land of corruption, bribery, and collusion with the Nazis.

I’m not trying to justify it, mind, and I still think injustice is worse when there is more of it. Still…

I happen to have watched a few episodes of that 24 show, and the head dude in there, Mr. Sutherland, says something about some guys in his commando office or whatever who had been caught taking bribes – something to the effect that they weren’t bad people, they just compromised one little time, and every time you compromise it gets a bit easier to do it the next time, because compromise becomes part of your character.

I got my Canadian motorcycle license two days ago, and I did not have to bribe anybody, or be anyone’s second cousin. I just paid my fees, took my tests, and Bob became my uncle, as they say.

Still, there were compromises. For instance, I broke the law by riding to my motorcycle skills test without a supervisor. I justified it by saying that I had to get there to take the test to be able to ride without a supervisor, so it was a catch-22. Besides, the test people have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy because they know that most people won’t get a supervisor to come in with them – so it is almost like I had official sanction. Almost. But the fact remains that if I had made abiding by the law a top priority, I could have found a way.

Corruption and compromise are worked through the character of every person on this planet. Those who are more successful at maintaining their integrity often throw the benefit they may have done themselves out the window by wallowing in smug self-righteousness. Still, the first step towards change is acknowledging that change is necessary.

So I say thumbs up to the forces that demand accountability. Thumbs up to cops (God love ‘em), and thumbs up to fighting tooth and nail to preserve the lost cause of character. There is nobility in lost causes, and we be nobles here, each one.