Here we go again. No matter what we do as bikers, the world sees us all as 1 percenters. Criminals, thugs, drug dealers, or deviants. Last year, there was plenty of coverage for the bad apples in the news when some dummies shot up a show in Colorado, but the other day, a club in California lost their clubhouse in a fire. You may not be able to dig the story up, but I finally did.
They used the facility to assemble toys for needy kids as part of their charity. National news? Nope. Regional news? Barely.
Brian Trum, a member of the Boozefighters Motorcycle Club in Southern California says the club uses the space to assemble and store bikes for their annual ‘Christmas With Kids’ bike giveaway. That particular chapter has been around over 70 years before the fire. And that, apparently isn’t newsworthy.
And that pisses me off. The club has started a GoFundMe page to get the charity back on its feet, but the real problem is that the mainstream doesn’t give a damn.
That needs to change. I mean, we get plenty of bad news in the press, but when bikers get together to do something more responsible than the average taxpayer, nobody says a word? Why is that? If we’d been talking about a group that dressed up like fuzzy little animals and line danced, the world would’ve stopped and we’d have had CNN, Fox, and every other major media outfit knocking down the door to interview members and the kids they’ve helped.
In reality. though, the fact that we’ve got a “gang” of “scary” bikers with nicknames must mean they are a bunch of radicals. Nevermind the truth that they are just taxpayers who give a damn about the community, nevermind that these are guys that take time and money from their own family to better someone else’s.
One of the things I’m going to work on this Spring is to try to collate a list of Biker-funded charities around North America. Don’t worry, as I get it all put into a file, I’ll make sure that we post that up here on the blog, but if the rest of the world won’t pay attention to us, we’ll just take a cue from the bumper sticker – Loud pipes save lives. I guess we need to get louder – and what better place to discuss motorcycle charities than from the pulpit we have here?
I guess the time has come to simply keep it in the family.