Your rights end where mine begin.

Not the actual kid or bike.

I try to get along with my neighbors. I really do, but some of my neighbors make it very difficult. One, in particular, a seventeen-year-old boy who dropped out of school a few years ago and still has no job, makes life on Church Street pretty miserable. You see, he likes to ride off-road vehicles, ATVs, four-wheelers, and dirtbikes. I get it, those are fun to ride. I had a dirtbike of my own when I was a kid, and I spent many hours riding trails around my father’s four-acre property outside the town where we lived.

The trouble here is that we are not “outside of town”, we are in the very middle of town, in what could rightly be called a historic neighborhood: the old mill village. The homes here mostly sit less than thirty feet from the street, and the street is little more than an old buckboard wagon road overlaid with a layer of asphalt.

It’s a tight neighborhood. If you have your windows open you can hear every word the neighbors say on their front porch. Many a spring night I have laid awake in bed, forced to listen to the rantings of the boy across the street, or his mother when she visits, basically screaming at the top of their lungs because they have no “inside voice”. And the words they use are generally filled with curses and eff-bombs.

For much of the past few months, I have looked the other way when the boy rides his off-road vehicles, seemingly from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week, even in the rain. We had what amounts to a warzone here last summer when the boy’s cousin would bring a large ATV without a muffler over and literally rattle our windows with it. I think the police eventually convinced them not to bring that one back into town.

For a while, the only vehicles being operated were smaller four-wheeler types, fairly quiet, and mostly they rode (there’s a little girl from another house who rides with him most days) in the back of the property, away from the street and my house. This was not a problem. If people want to let their children ride without helmets, as dangerous as that is (a helmet saved my life around that age) it’s not my business.

But recently the boy obtained a loud dirtbike, which, by the way, is so poorly tuned it spews foul exhaust everywhere it goes and will not idle on its own, so the kid has to constantly rev the motor. And he rides it more and more often around the front. Thus far I have looked the other way and said nothing, but next week the weather will turn warm. My wife and I will want to enjoy the porch on the side of our house, or I will want to work in my gardens, which happen to be in the front yard because that’s the only place on our property with full sun.

So here’s the deal. We have a noise ordinance in this town. I have seen it. It applies to noisy dirtbikes in addition to loud stereos and such. It contains provisions for fines and, if that doesn’t work, impoundment of the equipment causing the violation.

I cannot reason with these neighbors of mine; I have tried and failed again and again. It always degenerates into name-calling and passive-aggressive behavior on the part of the oldest adults in the home. I will not attempt to engage them anymore. I have spent the past six months or more looking the other way and ignoring their efforts to get a rise out of me, and all it has gotten me is a slow escalation of their bullshit.

I am a property owner and a taxpayer, and as such, I have a right to enjoy my property as much as the next citizen of Ramseur. I tried to get the board of commissioners to consider an ordinance that would limit the use of ATVs and dirtbikes to properties in town large enough for them not to become such a nuisance, but my efforts were completely ignored.

So while the boy across the street may have the right to ride his motorbikes in his grandmother’s yard, I have an equal right to enjoy my yard without being constantly disturbed by the incessant noise and foul-smelling (not to mention carcinogenic) fumes of those poorly tuned vehicles.

Consider yourselves forewarned neighbors. Beginning sometime next week, and certainly by next weekend, I will begin calling the police to enforce our town’s noise ordinance, because your right to ride that damned bike ends where it infringes on my right to enjoy my home. Keep it behind the house, away from the street, and we’ll not have a problem.

Hate speech should not be free speech.

Police assault demonstrators in Graham, North Carolina, October 31, 2020. Photo Credit: Carli Brosseau

As I watched President Biden’s inauguration this morning I was torn between two disparate emotions, relief and apprehension. Relief that after four years of utter incompetence, blatant nepotism, and non-stop hateful rhetoric we now have a competent team taking over the executive branch of our federal government. Apprehension because only a child or a fool would believe that the swearing-in of a new president will change the hearts and minds of friends, neighbors, and family members who have spent the last four years showing us who they really are. As Maya Angelou once wrote, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

I am glad that Donald Trump is gone. He and those who enabled him over the past four years did nothing but divide this nation and give relevancy to ideas most of us thought had long ago been relegated to the dustbin of history. We all knew there were still pockets of bigotry and hate scattered across this nation, but until Mr. Trump and his sycophants came along four years ago, most of those people kept their backward thoughts to themselves.

In that respect Donald Trump has actually done our nation an invaluable service: he showed us exactly who many of our neighbors really are; people who are fine with white supremacy, anti-Semitism, homophobia, violence, and other deplorable ideas as long as their team is in charge. Yes, that is really what it boils down to.

President Biden has called for unity, and that’s a worthy goal I support, but for real unity that is sustainable long term, there must be reconciliation, not a ceasefire. Those who participated in the Capitol riot must be charged, tried, and upon conviction punished for their actions, but those people did not arrive at those ideas on their own.

Over the years we have witnessed white supremacist ideologies and unfounded conspiracy theories move from fringe websites and late-night AM radio to mainstream media where greater exposure to larger audiences allowed those often dangerous ideas to spread like an unchecked pandemic. Those among us who spread hate, unfounded conspiracy theories, and outright lies, inspiring others to act out in violent ways, must be held accountable for their rhetoric.

Free speech is included in the First Amendment to our constitution because it is one of the most essential and precious rights we possess, but it is not a blank check to spew hate or inspire violence wherever we please without consequence. Free speech is a grave responsibility, especially in this digital age where we all have the power to send our words to the far reaches of the earth in an instant.

Justifications for limiting free speech often include something called the harm principle, first proposed by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which suggests that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”  That means social disapproval or dislike for someone’s actions isn’t enough to justify intervention by the government unless there is a good chance those actions might harm someone else. For example, if you want to drink alcohol and you are a legal adult, you should be free to do so, but if you get behind the wheel of a car while under the influence, then you become a danger to your community and the government has a duty to infringe upon your rights to prevent you from harming others.

As an advocate for free speech I find myself torn today. Where do we draw the line in the sand on hate speech and symbols that reinforce ideas such as white supremacy? Our courts have determined that freedom of speech is not absolute. The American legal system generally sets limits on freedom of speech when it conflicts with other rights, such as in cases of libel, slander, obscenity, fighting words, or intellectual property. I believe it’s time for us to have an earnest conversation about hate speech and symbols in this country.

The Trump administration spent four years normalizing bigotry and white supremacy in America while the rest of the world looked on in horror. Trump made it seem acceptable to publicly mock people with disabilities and bragged about treating women as sexual playthings instead of persons fully equal to their male counterparts.

Worse, Donald Trump made it acceptable to use violence against Americans peacefully demonstrating against police brutality and murder, which, by the way, is also a right protected by the First Amendment. Following Trump’s lead law enforcement coast to coast escalated the use of force against peaceful protestors while Proud Boys, Boogaloos, and other white supremacist militias illegally carried guns to rallies without so much as a slap on the wrist.

If the mob on Capitol Hill two weeks ago had been predominantly people of color, you know as well as I do that Pennsylvania Avenue would have become a river of blood. This disparity is unacceptable and it must end now. For far too long we have allowed white supremacy to run unchecked in the United States of America, above and below the surface of our society.

Racist monuments to sedition and slavery, erected a century ago to oppress our Black brothers and sisters, must be removed from our public spaces and relegated to museums or the scrap yard. They are symbols of a failed insurrection based on white supremacy and the preservation of slavery and they have no place in twenty-first-century America as anything but teaching tools to show future generations how wrong their ancestors were. If real lasting unity is to be achieved this is a first step we must all take together.