November 4, 2003 by lonbud

The Nature Of Freedom

Something has been bugging me for quite a while.

Avid readers of this space might think it’s been George Bush and the mean, fearful, secretive, mendacious, inept administration he fronts.

But they would only be partially correct.

I am a human being first and an American second, for what it’s worth.

But I love my country and love very much that it embodies the many things that make it the envy of oppressed people everywhere, that make it a land people are willing to kill, and to die for.

So I have been trying hard to accept the notion that We the People should look beyond our having been lied to.

And not by small or half-truths, either.

From the get-go: “it’s not about nation building;” “Saddam’s got connections to al Qaeda;” “Saddam’s trading in fissionable material;” “Saddam’s in possession of a vast store of weapons of mass destruction;” “Saddam’s the most ruthless, heartless, depraved (“He gassed his own people!”) dictator this world has ever known.”

We are there. There is no changing that much.

We went in, and put the Shock and Awe on the Sunni/Baathist sumbitches, and now Saddam’s sons are dead. He’s dead or in hiding, and a long-oppressed people is, well, that’s part of the rub. Free?

The Bush Administration would now, finally, have us believe (“OK, the real truth is…”) it was about the Iraqi people after all, and about our bestowing upon them the gift and the glories of democracy.

In fact, it’s a crucial part of the long-term plan for bringing peace and stability to all of the Middle East. A “long, hard slog” it may be now, in the words of the Secretary of Defense, but with democracy’s taking root in the sands of Iraq, Islamic fundamentalism throughout the region is doomed.

No more will the children of Islam be inculcated with murderous, suicidal hatred for America or Israel, even.

In time, Baghdad will resemble Boca Raton (without the ocean, of course). Mecca will be like Rock City. And the summer softball leagues on the West Bank will be great, hard-fought fun.

I mean, OK, our President told some lies, but the Iraqi people are free, and one day soon the whole Israeli-Palestinian thing will be a thing of the past, and the world isn’t going to have to worry about having enough oil for its energy needs, and American companies are going to do really well because of this, which means American workers are going to have jobs again, and American CEOs are going to get even bigger bonuses, and the stock market is going to come back, and go even higher, and it’s all going to be just fine.

So why don’t We just shut the hell up, right?

I’ll tell you why.

Because you can’t make people be free. Freedom comes from within a person and from within a people. When did anyone ever make someone else be free?

Democracy was born in the United States of people who yearned to be free, and who made themselves free from an Imperial hand reaching beyond its grasp.

Free, also, from the bitter, unforgiving wilderness into which they were willing to cast themselves in their yearning.

They freed themselves, too, from the inconvenience of another people whose presence and culture they could not accept or understand. But that’s another story.

The lessons and opportunities of democracy (as good a vehicle for the codification of freedom as man has devised) have been embraced and adopted by many people in the past 300 to 400 years (it IS a good idea). But I daresay it is yet to be imposed upon the first living soul.

What ought to be interesting is seeing who on this earth will claim freedom’s prerogatives in the next 30 to 40 years.