Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Being independence day, I decided to write something about freedom, and what it means, and how the general cultural view might miss some of the real point about what freedom is, and where it best expressed.
Freedom tends to boil down to freedom of choice. The question is what choices that we have. There is a certain set out there that tries to take the whole idea of freedom of choice hostage to a woman and “her body” and thus sublimates all other options to that one overriding one. I don’t intend to do that here today.
Freedom of choice is seen in:
Freedom of association
Freedom of occupation
Freedom of movement
When we feel most trapped in our lives, is when we have a sense that there are no choices available to us. In many countries around the world, that was often true for people. They had to live, they had to stay in a certain place. There was no choice as far as a job was concerned. They had to mingle in certain circles and no others.
Here we get this confused. We think freedom of occupation means the guarantee of a job. But what it really means is we have a choice. If we don’t like our job, we can leave it. It doesn’t guarantee we can find another job. We confuse freedom with safety too often. It is easy to feel trapped in a job, because you “need it” and nothing can change, when things really can change, we just may not like the uncertainty that change might bring. But to exercise our freedom, we need to make ourselves open to the possibility of that change. Whether you leave or not, knowing you have the freedom to choose, is empowering.
Freedom of movement means we can go where we please without interference. That is fairly true — unless you want to use an airplane, where movements are monitored and curtailed. But we have no national identity cards that we have to show to cross state borders, for example. We don’t recognize how unusual that is in this world, nor how subtly movement is being curtailed, practically.
For association, the creep on our freedom is a governmental “guilt by association”, and a certain societal push where people of certain political persuasions are persona non grata. But there is little real compulsion on those yet.
Those are my disjointed reflections on freedom for an independence day.
At The Rainbow 