What Does Freedom
Mean To Me?
I guess because Independence Day is just around the corner,
the exquisite CynaraJane has asked her readers to discourse a bit on the topic
of :
Although I am not and have never been a card-carrying
member of CynaraJane’s Scurvy Dogs and Salty Wenches Blogring, I figured I’d
give it a try.
One can go in a lot of different directions with this, so I
thought I’d write on a topic I’ve been meaning to write on anyway. Most of the other entries seem to be reading like American high
school civics assignments, but I digress.
College afforded me the opportunity to escape the white
working-class cocoon of my youth, and become intimately acquainted with people
of a wide range of racial and ethnic heritages.
I had a Canadian and a Japanese roommate, both of whom were delightful
in every respect. I spent three months
living in France
with a French family who loved me as their very own son, and I traveled
briefly to London and Amsterdam. After taking the most illuminating course I have ever
taken in life, a Sociology course entitled “Race and Minority Group Relations”,
I did three-month teaching internships in two different inner-city American schools. While I got mugged and robbed a couple of
times, an impoverished black family was gracious enough to invite me into their home for Thanksgiving
dinner, and another black guy, an auto mechanic on disability, had the kindness to repair my old
Rambler free of charge.
During my college years the war in Viet
Nam was going on. I was being told by my government that the
North Vietnamese were my “enemies”; many Americans called them “gooks” to
dehumanize them in order to kill them with a greater detachment. The American government had, of course, its
rationale, its “Domino Theory”. But what
I saw with my own eyes was my government invading a sovereign nation, while at
the same time murdering my fellow college students and fellow citizens who were
peacefully protesting at Kent State
and Jackson State
Universities, right here at home.
So I never bought into the official propaganda. Though I did not yet know any Vietnamese personally, my life experiences enabled me to
extrapolate, and to conclude that the Vietnamese were in all probability people
very much like me, just wanting to live and let live. There was a time not long before I was born
when the Japanese were likewise our “enemies”, yet I could find nothing to hate about my
Japanese roommate. If the French were
warm and gracious and loving people, then so in all likelihood were the
Germans. Experience had taught me that
black people, who were still considered sub-human in some quarters of the United
States, were on the whole a pure pleasure to be
around.
Through all this I learned several very important
lessons, lessons which have never left me.
I have subsequently gone back to France,
visited Italy,
and spent six weeks in the Slovak Republic,
a former “Iron Curtain” country. I have
been married to a Filipina, making my daughter half Filipina. I have had many more positive experiences
with blacks and other minority groups. I
have had close relationships with people who differ markedly from me in race
and ethnicity, in language and culture, in religious belief and sexual
orientation.
I have been enriched by all of these experiences, and through
them I have learned that I am a citizen of the world, and more particularly of the common, ordinary people. I have concluded that wars are fought between
the ruling elites of various countries, and have very little to do with
me. Their interests are generally not my
interests, and their skein of lies and propaganda has grown increasingly easy
to see through. No one is ever going to
tell me, “If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists”. Or at least no one is ever going to make me
believe it for even a single moment.
Therefore freedom for me is primarily the power to think for myself,
and not to allow anyone else to determine for me whom I should like and whom I
should dislike; who my enemies are at any given time; to whom I owe my allegiance
and whom I should fear. It is the power to deconstruct propaganda and seek the attainment of true wisdom. This power to
think for myself in turn affords me the freedom to reach across artificial
barriers of race, culture, and ethnicity; to try to build bridges rather than walls;
to work at making this world a little better place for ALL of us. It just makes me sad that so many of my fellow humans allow themselves to be led around by the nose, to be manipulated shamelessly by cynical, self-serving "leaders" whose thinly-veiled agendas include not a scintilla of concern for the general, collective welfare.
EDIT: I feel constrained to add, just in case it isn't obvious to some, that this power to think for oneself is a "natural right" that must be apprehended by and for oneself. It is not a freedom that can be conferred by any government or Constitution, and while it may be encouraged in principle by certain Constitutional provisions such as our First Amendment, in practice it is strongly discouraged by those in power. Woe unto you if you engage in thinking or speaking that is too far outside, in the words of Noam Chomsky, "the limits of allowable discourse".
Use your Xanga names, people!
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