Freedom

For me, freedom is the ability to do whatever you want whenever you want. Sort of.

Freedom is also a paradox. On one hand we all have it all the time and on the other hand, we never really have it.

Allow me to talk about the first part, the part where we have it all the time. First, the ultimate freedom would be for me or you to kill another human. There’s no question in my mind that I could do that, at least I could physically do that. With the advent of modern weaponry, it becomes almost effortless. You just pick up a loaded gun, point it at someone and pull the trigger. It happens daily. Amnesty International claims that five hundred people die every day from gun violence. That’s about one person every three minutes of every hour of every day. Perpetually. That’s a lot of violence. That’s also way-too-much-freedom.

You also have lots of other ways to validate that you have freedom. How many males in the world abandon their children? How many women have abortions? How many spouses have consensual sex with another partner at the risk of destroying their marriage? How many humans physically or emotionally abuse their children or other members of their family? How many people allow that abuse to continue to themselves or others? How many people quit their jobs on the spur of the moment? How many people accumulate significant debt by gambling? How many people steal? How many people have serious drug addictions? How many people turn a blind eye to some really bad things that are happening to others? How many people work incredibly hard to accumulate ridiculously large fortunes and ignore the plight of people left homeless through no fault of their own?

Hey, I could go on and on and on and on.

The point is that God gives you the right to do any damned thing you please, at least if you are capable of doing it in the reality in which you find yourself.

Also, you need to understand that society takes a lot of those rights away. Or, at least makes actually practicing certain freedoms somewhat scary if you get caught practicing them. Like rape and/or murder.

I’ll talk about the first point first. You can’t really do anything you want whenever you want. God may give you that power but God gives you that power within the realm of God’s reality and your current ability to understand it. That is, as an example, you have to be able to do certain things within the realm of physical possibility. You can’t simply make yourself invisible whenever you want no matter how bad you want to. You can’t, literally, walk on water. You can’t simply will yourself pregnant or not pregnant or skinny or beautiful or ridiculously sexy. Yes, you can walk on water with the right equipment. Yes you can be pregnant or not pregnant or skinny or beautiful or ridiculously sexy, but that involves something to happen that involves something more than simple will power or twitching your nose.

As for society, God may give you the right to do anything you want any time you want within the constructs of reality but society takes that away, thankfully. I don’t want to be walking down a sidewalk and come upon you defecating in a fountain in a park alongside that sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon in front of a dozen or so people simply because you want to exercise your “God given rights” as a free human being. Have a little decency, if not intelligence. Even though some people might want to see that and even applaud you for doing it, the vast number of Americans simply don’t want to take in that vision.

Freedom comes with a footnote. My belief is that the footnote for freedom should emphasize that a particular freedom should be exercised judiciously, or, if not, the exercise of that freedom should at least call into question the social value of disallowing or disavowing that freedom.

Let me give you an example of that.

The Founding Fathers of the United States of America, while seeking to create a government to insure the inalienable rights of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as stated in the Declaration of Independence, just happened to legalize de facto slavery, that is, the human bondage of other humans, in the United States Constitution with the infamous section of the document which stated that “three fifths of all other Persons” should be counted when deciding how many competent, wealthy, respectable, learned and enlightened white males should comprise one of the esteemed bodies of that government. At the time, many disavowed the institution of slavery, but due to the needs of certain interested parties to compromise to create the United States, some political issues, such as the right to own another individual, were often disavowed by many, but not disallowed by any.

In 1865, seventy-seven years, about three generations later, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery as well as involuntary servitude with an exception for the punishment of a crime. At that point the ownership of humans as chattel was disallowed as well as officially disavowed from a legal, moral and ethical standpoint. The freedom, or right to own another human being and take away their right for freedom, became law in the United States. Society had spoken. Or, at least a new generation of competent, wealthy, respectable, learned and enlightened white males had.

In 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution granted women the freedom to exercise their right to vote, another huge and long overdue step on the road to political freedom performed by a bunch of competent, wealthy, respectable, learned and enlightened white males. There were no black males in Congress at that time.

At this point you might wonder if I have some kind of liberal political axe to grind. I do not. I just believe that, of all freedoms, political freedoms are the most egregious and for all the rhetoric about the greatness of the founding fathers, I know of no example of any of them ever espousing any form of universal suffrage. In their day the “acceptable” political sentiment of the day was that women, as well as slaves and other social “rabble”, should not have the right to vote. Granted, it was the mood and fashion of the times. I’m not questioning that. What I am questioning is whether, in the twenty-first century, we should be disenfranchising our fellow citizens of the freedom to vote for elected officials who will make the laws that govern them. To me, legally disallowing someone to vote because they are “ungodly” or have different beliefs than we do is one of the most significant sins that someone who gives “lip service” to liberty can commit. Of all the freedoms that we have, I believe that the freedom to vote is the absolute essential prerequisite for defining America as “the land of the free and the home of the brave” for without the vote we are not free and we certainly are not brave enough to hear and bear what others are saying with their vote in the political arena.

Okay, maybe it’s time to get off my political soapbox and reflect on some more important aspects of freedom.

First, I need to point out that I’m only going to address freedom in terms of what it means in the United States. There’s a little thing called national sovereignty that implies that any country can make and enforce any law that it wants no matter what the citizens of any other country have to say about that law. Most people never stop to consider the implications of that statement. I only make the statement because I’ve probably been to a hundred or so more countries than you have been to and I have experienced the implications of that national sovereignty firsthand. For example, if I go to a country where the predominant religion is Islam the first question I am often asked by an average male on the street who speaks English and wants to have a conversation is “How many wives do I have?” Interestingly, I’m never really sure if these individuals are trying to impress me with the number of wives they have or if they really do wonder how many wives I have, being too naïve to understand that my wife’s attorney would never allow me to have more wives. This should drive home the fact that national sovereignty can dramatically impact one’s freedom. Wikipedia has a really interesting article on Women’s rights in Saudi Arabia and I could go on and on and on about the suppression of rights in other countries but that’s a really, really deep hole. It’s bad enough in America. I think everyone who has any thoughts at all about freedom should first understand that freedom is a function of the geographic location and year of your birth. Those two factors affect your freedoms much more significantly than any other factors you can name.

I’ll have more to say about freedom in further posts but for now let me just say that freedom is a non-starter with me. You’re as free as you think you are. Anyone can take away that freedom with the pull of a trigger or by running a stop sign while you’re going through an intersection. You can also lose your freedom by living a lifestyle that a more prudent individual would consider to be a bit on the ludicrously risky side.

Then again, it’s your life and God gave you all the freedom anyone could possibly want. Just remember that God gave that same freedom to everyone else as well and all those cliches about freedom are just that – cliches. Use your freedoms as judiciously as possible.

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