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Hello Internet, my name is John Wessel and this is my bike! Not much to say about it.
It's a nice one. I built it a couple of years ago: titanium frame, all that good stuff.
So, my first time showing my face on camera, it's appropriate I do so in my bike shorts
of shame.
I think the most important issue to me at this point in my life is liberty, the idea
of human liberty. It's a very intellectual sort of thing. A lot of other intellectual
people have also found this by reading late at night, thinking and pondering and sometimes
when they look at the world, things don't seem to fit together right.
But then, I think those of us who figured out how important liberty is made a mistake
in trying to convince other people by trying to take them down the path that we went down
when we found out about liberty. But, people are different. People approach things from
different angles. If we want to be better communicators, we have to learn their language.
Now, hopefully people learn the language of the intellectual arguments too, so we can
meet half way. But, if they don't, I think it's up to people in this private Internet
community, intellectual community, to reach out.
I think one of the best arguments that can possibly be made is people using their power
of human choice and liberty to look good, to exercise, to eat well, to be healthy, to
be nice, to have a purpose. If whenever you see someone who looks like they've got their
life together and is working well for them then you ask them what did you do and you
just say, "I recognized I had choice and liberty." That's going to make a very powerful argument.
So, I'm dedicating this month to projecting that out, just a good message.
Say there's an issue like Obamacare. Sure, there's a lot of technical things wrong with
it and I think if someone really analyzes it they'll find out it's a terrible program.
But, maybe the more important, or at least more communicative message to send is, "Hey,
the better part of health is taking care of yourself." So, I'm going to take care of myself
without someone else telling me to and reach out to other people, network with my friends.
Sure, at some point in our lives we all get sick. We need healthcare but that's not really
the problem at this point. At this point, people in this country are missing health
and we don't need big brother to tell us and force us to do that. We can do that on our
own.
So, this month is the liberty month where I turn my bike pants of shame into bike pants
of glory. Alright, thanks for listening.