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Another one I don’t buy is when people try and tell me that my freedoms came from some soldier fighting for them. You know the kind of people I am talking about. “Gee, you like basic human freedoms? THANK A SOLDIER!!!!!!!!!” and so forth. I don’t buy it. Who was coming to take my freedoms away that some soldier prevented from succeeding? I didn’t see anything! So this week, and especially with today being Veterans Day when this kind of pablum is passed around as conventional wisdom, I would like to examine the idea that soldiers = freedom.
And as an insta-disclaimer, I would like to stop here and say that I have nothing but love and respect for soldiers all over the world. Much as I bemoan the necessity of a military, and long for a day that it isn’t needed, until such time I am very glad that there are people willing to sacrifice their individual persons to ensure that the rest of us don’t have to. This isn’t about hating soldiers. This is about hating idiots. Same as always.
First off, we have to determine what we mean by freedom. There is all sorts of freedom. And many of them, no soldier or legislation or anything has managed to procure for us. None of us are free from the inevitability of death. None of us has full three-dimensional freedom of motion, not on a world with such a strong gravitational force at least. None of us, or damn fucking few, are free from the expectation of having to “work” just to survive and live in basic human comfort. I do not have the freedom to light up a big spliff in the middle of Main Street in broad daylight. And in fact, if I do, soldiers — well, not soldiers, but similar armed and uniformed people on the government payroll called “police” — will put me in a cage and TAKE AWAY MY FREEDOM. So what kind of freedom do the soldiers give, exactly?
Well, duh Noel, it is obvious that they are talking about the wonderful freedoms of this incredible nation of ours, as guaranteed by that hallowed scroll they call the U.S. Constitution! Bad people all around the world want to take our freedoms away, and soldiers stop this. By killing them, killing them dead. If you like being free, HUG A VETERAN!!!!!!!!
Wait. So what I don’t understand about this premise is, who is threatening our freedoms? I lived during the 9-11 attacks, which if you kids don’t remember was THE ONLY TIME SINCE 1812 that an enemy managed to strike on civilian territory. (Pearl Harbor was a military base, but hell count that too if you want. That was still seventy years ago.) And it was terrible. Three thousand people died! But my freedoms? The only one threatening them was George Bush, when he signed the Patriot Act. My point is, NO ONE HAS THREATENED OUR FREEDOM, EVER.
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IS SURROUNDED BY OCEANS.
Unless Canada or Mexico get some funny ideas, there is absolutely no way that anyone (using conventional transportation technology currently available) can mount a successful invasion of the United States. So what foreign power is threatening my freedom? Can one of you soldiers-gave-me-my-freedom motherfuckers please explain this to me?
I think what the problem is that they are confusing “freedom” with “a mostly stable sense of security.” And god help us if that’s true, because if most people seriously consider a feeling of security to be synonymous with human liberty, we are even further from the end of the Dark Ages than I would like to think. That’s not freedom, folks. Freedom is something that is entirely personal and individual. We will never have pure 100% freedom as we understand it as an abstract concept, because we are limited physical beings. We take up one space and we move. We eat and we shit and we breathe and we die. There is no such thing as “guaranteed freedom from death” or “guaranteed freedom from having horrible things happening to you.” Even in the most ideal utopia some people will still snap and kill other people. There will always be tragic accidents. The basic state of the universe is chaos and what structures we manage to build are purely in spite of this.
Freedom is a state of mind, a willingness to accept one’s circumstances and the ability to make decisions within those circumstances — and FACE THE CONSEQUENCES. It is provided to you in entirety at your birth and what you choose to do with this freedom is up to you. It is your free choice to ignore it, it is your free choice to give it to other people to tell you how to live your life. It is your free choice to throw up your hands in despair and kill yourself. It is your free choice to pursue your dreams in whatever way you see fit. It is your free choice to give up on your dreams. This freedom is yours for your lifespan and no one, NO ONE, no matter how many of them there are nor how big their guns are, can take this freedom from you, and nor CAN THEY PROVIDE IT.
Oh, and hey, happy Veterans Day.
Under the guise of fighting terrorism, the Patriot Act was adopted WITHOUT public approval or vote just weeks after the events of 9/11. Such an unconstitutional set of laws should be abolished seeing as they violate human rights and due process. A mere 3 criminal charges of terrorism a year attributed to this act, which is mainly used for no-knock raids leading to drug-related arrests without proper cause for search and seizure. The laws are simply a means to spy on our own citizens and to detain and torture dissidents without trial or a right to council. You can read much more about living in this Orwellian society of fear and see my visual response to these measures on my artist’s blog at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2011/09/living-in-society-of-fear-ten-years.html
Brandt, you are entirely preaching to the choir. Thanks for the commentary. Also, I like the picture of ODB on your site. True story: I was at the Wu-Tang Clan concert the day before he died. He never showed up. All the rest of the Wu was there — even Cappadonna — but no Dirty. RZA fought ninjas on stage. GZA brought his son out to rap. But no Dirty. At the end Method Man addressed the audience and said, “If you see the ODB, tell him–” and at that point U-God interrupted and said “If you see him, kick his ass!” Not twelve hours later Dirt McGirt was dead. Big Baby Jesus, we hardly knew ye.