Freedom

For no particular reason I began considering the word Freedom today.  I guess while I mow the yard I don’t have much to concentrate on, and when that happens I wander off into random thoughts.  Today with the clear blue sky above me, a refreshing gentle breeze, and the noise of the mower isolating me, I wandered the yard semi-lost in thought. 

Perhaps it is because I am older, or perhaps because I was in the Air Force and had an opportunity to see other parts of the world, but for whatever reason I like to think I understand the concept a little better than most young adults.  So I thought I would take a few minutes to write about freedom.

In the United States, most of Europe, the Common Wealth, and a good number of other countries the US has influenced, there is a fairly common view of the rights of the citizen.  In the US they are codified in the Bill of Rights, in England and most parliamentary governments they are not so clear, but they are there.  We, for the last 231 years or so, have governed ourselves, sometime well, other times no so well, but our governments have, for the most part, respected the right of the individual, over the rights of the state.  Why?  Because we are a nation of laws, and the courts serve as a valuable check to the Executive and the Legislature, both of which are driven by the passion and politics of the day.

The key here is law, not opinion, not feelings, not common sense, not mob rule, but law.  If we are to maintain our freedom we have to have laws, and we have to have a vast majority of our population believe in and obey those laws.  Unlike a teenager who disagrees with the parents and rebels with little impact, we cannot disregard the law, if we can do so without consequence, then the society fails.

With the advent of television it seemed we would open ourselves up to the rest of the world, to see how the rest of the world is, and let them see us.  Unfortunately it appears television has had just the opposite affect on the US.  Our nightly news rarely has more than a moment or two of foreign coverage and only then if some American has been killed, maimed or otherwise inconvenienced.  So how can we know what life is like and what freedom means to the rest of the world?  We are so busy watching the Simpson’s and taking opinion polls on what we should do about some Mother who murdered her children we don’t ever give the rest of the world a second’s thought.

So what does freedom mean to a good portion of the world?  Well, based on my experiences, freedom doesn’t mean diddlysquat.  It is an abstract concept, for them their concern is survival, today and tomorrow is all they can afford to think about.  There is no thought of choice.  It doesn’t matter if they have a prince, a king, a warlord or a dictator, they are only concerned that someone doesn’t come in the middle of the night to steal their children, their livestock or their lives.  Perhaps some in America can appreciate this but it does not appear to be many.   For all who complain about our nation and how corrupt or wrong we are they have no clue as to what they have that allows them this freedom.

We talk about the homeless, the poor and the starving in America.  It is a shame we have this problem, I believe we shouldn’t, but unfortunately we don’t live in a utopia, in a real world we will always have poverty.  Even if all these people who believe the wealth of the rich belong to the Government got their way; they would not eradicate poverty.  There will always be those who have and those who don’t have as much.  Perhaps it is insensitive of me but when I see the beggars on the corners, they don’t compare to the beggars I’ve seen in other parts of the world.  Here beggars have a chance to be something else, in Bangladesh they don't.  That is Freedom.