All of us tend to take for granted the current freedoms, education, future prospects, lifestyle choices, which we (it is hoped) enjoy, but each freedom has been hard-won, and is always in danger of being lost by inaction. The WNBR stands for our rights to push boundaries, to cast aside social convention, to protest in the manner of our own choosing, to declare ourselves both unique and individual, and surely in control of our own destinies.
Each one of us has the basic human right to live life in any manner he or she chooses, so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else by their actions. This includes cycling naked through the city, attending and encouraging street protests, demanding a change in attitude from the current people at the top of the tree. Just fifty years ago, one might very well have been locked up, and had the key thrown away for being naked in a public space, two hundred years ago one might have been burned at the stake or guillotined, which is presumably why no-one did it then.
Fortunately times change, the stringent morality of those days have given way to a more enlightened outlook where individual expression has an inherent validity. The WNBR could not have happened five hundred years ago when church hypocrisy held sway amongst the nation state powers in Europe
Extract from the World Naked Bike Ride book.
