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What Does It Mean To Be Free?

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Frank Ventrola

We have just fought a war which, we have lately been told, was undertaken to impose freedom on a people that didn't request it and didn't fight for it. The people of Iraq are paying a big price for this precarious "freedom," but it was not a willing price; and, therefore, if freedom comes to them it will have no value.

We Americans early on bought into the notion via a not totally negligible constitutional system, that We the People are the government, we rule ourselves, and those characters in DC, Albany, or wherever respond to our will, and serve our purposes. The humble fiction is that they are our creatures, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Thereby, the go-go-entrepreneurs, the corporate and military interests, and the politicians that are bought and sold by the pound, easily take charge of a nation of sleepwalkers already so convinced of their ever-wakeful wits, their freedom and independence, their rights, their goodness and generosity, their place of pre-eminence in the universe, their god-given right to manifest their destiny over all others and over the earth itself, etc., that they needn't bother to even watch the store while the robbers prowl and take in broad daylight.

We bought a bill of goods rather than a bill of rights, a Brooklyn Bridge of colossal audacity. They used to say: "It's a free country! Can if I want! Love it or leave it!" Such naive expressions are the cri-de-coeur of a naive people, a more prescient indicator of our valuation of freedom as any inherent right of due process or habeas corpus. Now we are told: "just get over it!" They might as well add: go back to sleep!

Is it possible that a "free" people can hardly be bothered to understand or even examine the issues and their own best interests, let alone the ways in which freedom is to be expressed or what responsibilities are imposed on us by freedom. We don't even bother to vote; or if we do, we accept the results blindly as a foregone conclusion. That's for the pinko-elites to fret about. If there was anything seriously at stake, surely our "free" press would inform us and wake us out of our indolence.

What it all boils down to is this: We are free, but only to the extent that we exercise our rights as a duty imposed on us; if we fight for it. Look at the Ukraine, or look at Tiananmen Square. Are we willing to face down the tanks as those people have done? The Freedom made possible in a democratic republic is a fight, an ongoing brawl; it demands participation, vigilance, and possibly that a position be taken on either side of a line that is being continuously redrawn.

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION