by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: October 05, 2010

We are in a land that people mistakenly believe was free at one time. America was never free, except for those who wanted to die quickly and probably in a terrible way. The reason that no human is ever truly free lies in the human need to survive, to have order and to have some regulating force over the actions of all. Even if there were no other humans around, there were still be the boundaries that are set for survival.

Getting food, fending off predators and surviving through the changes that every habitat goes through in the course of a year or even a day creates a need for some form of compliance; of getting with the program. America was no different and is no different now. 

There were other people who came to America long before Europeans, many of them from established cultures that had enough technology to cross vast tracts of the land bridges or to cross huge oceans. There were values, norms, rules, restrictions and beliefs that restricted much that men and women thought that they would want to do if they had the chance.  The lazy died or were killed. The old died or were left to die. The malformed or ill died or were killed in infancy. Someone had to be the leader. One tribe or another had to have a tract of land that they could call their own. Wars, evacuations, forced migrations and other stuff of human existence made what seemed to be a free place one which was not free at all.

Fast forward to today, where many think that only the European way of thinking matters here. In school, it used to be that no one was free to study other cultures or thought unless they agreed that they were studying inferior culture and thought. Now, there is relative freedom in education to even make up a whole new college major. But that is not even free. The new, made up college major must meet stringent requirements of the school in order for a legitimate university to award a college degree.

Many think that they are free to do drugs, lying about all day, only going out to get more money or to get more drugs. This is not true. They are only the most visible cogs in a vast business, criminal and financial machine that has plenty of rules, restrictions and consequences for not getting with the program. Once they are apprehended and sentenced, drug addicts and criminal dropouts go to prison, where they are the least free of all citizens.

But think of if a person were left to be entirely free...to take what they want, to kill whom they please, to do hygiene their own way or to spread disease without a bit of concern. Think about the unregulated corporations and ask how that worked for us all. Think about a poorly regulated militia or those who think that some twisted interpretation of the law entitles them to squat, unwanted and uninvited, in empty homes.

The first thing that we would clamor for would be for someone to come in and put some restrictions on those people. And we would gladly give up some of what we consider to be "freedoms" in order to do so. This process is easily seen in happily populated and gated communities where there are home owner's associations, with their covenants, codes and restrictions that go far beyond those of the lowest level of government.

America was never free and it never will be. A completely free population would be a nightmare that is beyond belief. But America has two great gifts: the freedom to express ourselves freely and the freedom to think freely.

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