So I was asked to list 10 freedoms which I believe are important, and then to narrow that list down to 3.
This was my response.
Do you remember the sitcom "The Golden Girls", and the character Sophia Patrillo? How she would solve all the problems of the world by reciting one simple anecdote from her childhood in Sicily? She would always begin her stories like this,
"Picture it, Sicily 1932…"
I will attempt to answer this highly complex task with a simple anecdote.
"Picture it, Chicago, 2007….its a brisk April afternoon, the sun is high in the sky casting glaring reflections into the eyes of those that pass between the metal and glass monoliths in Chicago's Down Town. A crisp breeze blows through this cold stone tunnel and plays with the hem of my skirt.
I see a man set up with his back to the glass wall and a flattened cardboard box spread out before him. Around him is gathered a group of tourists, business people like myself and a couple of teenagers. I slow down the "gotta get home" speed of my own clacking heels and my eyes focus on what the man is obviously trying to sell his audience.What I see causes my lips to curl into a small sardonic smile.
The old army classic, the shell game.
I watch as in their turn one businessman wins three times in a row, puffing himself up, eyes narrowed trying to show his coworker, the pretty woman in the amazing stiletto heels how shrewd he is, how daring, how confident. All the while playing into the hands of the operator. After three turns the Business man and his lady walk away with $50 more in their pockets, however the tourists whom stay behind do not have his "luck" they win a few but lose more. Why is that? Some of you will ask, because the game is rigged my friends, the businessman is really not the mark at all but rather a part of the company, like the muscle that comes and edges me away from the crowd when I refuse to play.
If you aren't stupid enough to put up your cash, and you aren't helpful enough to the scheme by acting your part then the operators have no use for you.
Making someone choose between Freedoms is like asking a kidnapped girl if she wants to get a finger chopped off or go straight to the carving her heart out with a rusty ice pick. One is a slow torture ending in eventual pain and death, one is just a quick and painful end to the charade that the maniac holding you hostage will eventually let you go. It does not matter at which "level of Importance" you place upon what freedom, if someone asks for you to give up a single one it is only a short time before they ask you to give up all.
"I may not agree with what you say but I will defend unto death your right to say it."
Every aspect of Freedom is important, because without one the whole house of cards will fall, and beware those that would take them from you. They are nothing more than operators, kidnappers, torturers with the loaded gun to your head asking you to choose between the bullets named SOPA, NDAA, Gun Control, wire tapping and "For your own better good". I refused to play the shell game then, just as I refuse to throw my freedoms under the bus now.
I completely understand what you are saying here, and admit my stance may be presented in a dramatic way to my reader, but I believe it is a valid comparison. I also fully understand, the importance of it and appreciate the awareness the question asks; What are the freedoms listed do you personally believe are the most valuable to you and your vision of a free society?
To be completely honest, this is precisely what I did, albeit in a very dramatic fashion. I wish to make a point, that freedom is such a messy and delicate thing, easily bent to the wishes and whims of the corrupt and self interested That if we compromise a single one the whole house of cards is just as vulnerable.
I simply took the question more literally, and realistically than the assignment called for. I asked myself the deeper, more fundamental question of "what freedoms do you have that you are willing to give up if you HAD to?" Each time I took one away from my list I felt dirty, and wrong. It is my firm belief that as it stands we do not have enough freedoms in this world, and what freedoms we do have are mostly a flimflam sham, a curtain thrown over the eyes of this worlds people making the happy herds follow their sheep dog overlords to the slaughtering pens; an illusion of epic proportions to keep the masses in check and unquestioning for as long as possible. I could not take any away in good conscious let alone getting them taken away.
So you ask, which three ultimately would I choose, knowing full well that whatever I chose would have to be the most humane, do the least amount of harm and to allow for a future where we would be able to work to get our freedoms back? Easy, I choose complete freedom or death. There is no such thing as partial freedom in this world only freedom and those wanting to make you submit.
We all suffer in some portion of ourselves without freedom and its my view point we need more freedoms in order to continue to prosper as a species. It's my belief that the freedom to pursue happiness looks great on paper; it is poetic bunch of buzz words that everyone can agree on but is never truly applied. If we were free to pursue happiness then how come we must work for evil corporations which corrupt our governments, poison our food and water supply, destroy our environment and auction our next generation's future for lavish unsustainable wealth today?
If we were truly free to pursue happiness then why must we owe money to banks with barely legal predatory loans just to be able to afford our own shelter? In America today, the supposed "land of the free" where we have more empty homes in Detroit than we have homeless people to fill them? Where the entrance to Nashville has a new suburb called "Tent city" made up of displaced people whom lost their homes when the "Housing bubble" burst. They call it burst like its some sort of harmless child's amusement instead of an irresponsible construct or self interested con-artists gambling with peoples lives and livelihood.
If we where free then why does education account for the average Americans most crippling debt? If we had freedom of religion then why are Atheists, Wiccans and Muslims constantly portrayed unfairly in the media, and the most distrusted people in America; a place where education is sold to the highest bidder, where foreign countries use our universities like trading cards.
We are not free while we cut science funding, education and space exploration left right and center even though it is science and technology based jobs which will grow the economy of the next generation of superpowers, while we continue to give tax breaks to polluters whom are free to destroy the only home we have available to us.
No we are not free to pursue happiness, we do not have freedom of religion, children do not receive fair and equal education and the financial means to pay for that education with a livable wage; where it is more likely employers conspire to erase unions which protect workers and sell our jobs to unscrupulous overseas governments and suppliers with dodgy human and labor rights laws than we "lazy" Americans would ever endure.
So you see, we aren't free, and certainly not free enough to leave a few rights alongside the road like rubbish, like they do not matter. Every freedom, every right, every amendment matters, our ancestors bled and died for every single one. We have come to this point in time on the backs of their sacrifices, and each freedom we have is a testament to them, their sufferings and their triumphs and I will not be the one whom gave up or took a single one for granted.
This was my response.
Do you remember the sitcom "The Golden Girls", and the character Sophia Patrillo? How she would solve all the problems of the world by reciting one simple anecdote from her childhood in Sicily? She would always begin her stories like this,
"Picture it, Sicily 1932…"
I will attempt to answer this highly complex task with a simple anecdote.
"Picture it, Chicago, 2007….its a brisk April afternoon, the sun is high in the sky casting glaring reflections into the eyes of those that pass between the metal and glass monoliths in Chicago's Down Town. A crisp breeze blows through this cold stone tunnel and plays with the hem of my skirt.
I see a man set up with his back to the glass wall and a flattened cardboard box spread out before him. Around him is gathered a group of tourists, business people like myself and a couple of teenagers. I slow down the "gotta get home" speed of my own clacking heels and my eyes focus on what the man is obviously trying to sell his audience.What I see causes my lips to curl into a small sardonic smile.
The old army classic, the shell game.
I watch as in their turn one businessman wins three times in a row, puffing himself up, eyes narrowed trying to show his coworker, the pretty woman in the amazing stiletto heels how shrewd he is, how daring, how confident. All the while playing into the hands of the operator. After three turns the Business man and his lady walk away with $50 more in their pockets, however the tourists whom stay behind do not have his "luck" they win a few but lose more. Why is that? Some of you will ask, because the game is rigged my friends, the businessman is really not the mark at all but rather a part of the company, like the muscle that comes and edges me away from the crowd when I refuse to play.
If you aren't stupid enough to put up your cash, and you aren't helpful enough to the scheme by acting your part then the operators have no use for you.
Making someone choose between Freedoms is like asking a kidnapped girl if she wants to get a finger chopped off or go straight to the carving her heart out with a rusty ice pick. One is a slow torture ending in eventual pain and death, one is just a quick and painful end to the charade that the maniac holding you hostage will eventually let you go. It does not matter at which "level of Importance" you place upon what freedom, if someone asks for you to give up a single one it is only a short time before they ask you to give up all.
"I may not agree with what you say but I will defend unto death your right to say it."
Every aspect of Freedom is important, because without one the whole house of cards will fall, and beware those that would take them from you. They are nothing more than operators, kidnappers, torturers with the loaded gun to your head asking you to choose between the bullets named SOPA, NDAA, Gun Control, wire tapping and "For your own better good". I refused to play the shell game then, just as I refuse to throw my freedoms under the bus now.
I completely understand what you are saying here, and admit my stance may be presented in a dramatic way to my reader, but I believe it is a valid comparison. I also fully understand, the importance of it and appreciate the awareness the question asks; What are the freedoms listed do you personally believe are the most valuable to you and your vision of a free society?
To be completely honest, this is precisely what I did, albeit in a very dramatic fashion. I wish to make a point, that freedom is such a messy and delicate thing, easily bent to the wishes and whims of the corrupt and self interested That if we compromise a single one the whole house of cards is just as vulnerable.
I simply took the question more literally, and realistically than the assignment called for. I asked myself the deeper, more fundamental question of "what freedoms do you have that you are willing to give up if you HAD to?" Each time I took one away from my list I felt dirty, and wrong. It is my firm belief that as it stands we do not have enough freedoms in this world, and what freedoms we do have are mostly a flimflam sham, a curtain thrown over the eyes of this worlds people making the happy herds follow their sheep dog overlords to the slaughtering pens; an illusion of epic proportions to keep the masses in check and unquestioning for as long as possible. I could not take any away in good conscious let alone getting them taken away.
So you ask, which three ultimately would I choose, knowing full well that whatever I chose would have to be the most humane, do the least amount of harm and to allow for a future where we would be able to work to get our freedoms back? Easy, I choose complete freedom or death. There is no such thing as partial freedom in this world only freedom and those wanting to make you submit.
We all suffer in some portion of ourselves without freedom and its my view point we need more freedoms in order to continue to prosper as a species. It's my belief that the freedom to pursue happiness looks great on paper; it is poetic bunch of buzz words that everyone can agree on but is never truly applied. If we were free to pursue happiness then how come we must work for evil corporations which corrupt our governments, poison our food and water supply, destroy our environment and auction our next generation's future for lavish unsustainable wealth today?
If we were truly free to pursue happiness then why must we owe money to banks with barely legal predatory loans just to be able to afford our own shelter? In America today, the supposed "land of the free" where we have more empty homes in Detroit than we have homeless people to fill them? Where the entrance to Nashville has a new suburb called "Tent city" made up of displaced people whom lost their homes when the "Housing bubble" burst. They call it burst like its some sort of harmless child's amusement instead of an irresponsible construct or self interested con-artists gambling with peoples lives and livelihood.
If we where free then why does education account for the average Americans most crippling debt? If we had freedom of religion then why are Atheists, Wiccans and Muslims constantly portrayed unfairly in the media, and the most distrusted people in America; a place where education is sold to the highest bidder, where foreign countries use our universities like trading cards.
We are not free while we cut science funding, education and space exploration left right and center even though it is science and technology based jobs which will grow the economy of the next generation of superpowers, while we continue to give tax breaks to polluters whom are free to destroy the only home we have available to us.
No we are not free to pursue happiness, we do not have freedom of religion, children do not receive fair and equal education and the financial means to pay for that education with a livable wage; where it is more likely employers conspire to erase unions which protect workers and sell our jobs to unscrupulous overseas governments and suppliers with dodgy human and labor rights laws than we "lazy" Americans would ever endure.
So you see, we aren't free, and certainly not free enough to leave a few rights alongside the road like rubbish, like they do not matter. Every freedom, every right, every amendment matters, our ancestors bled and died for every single one. We have come to this point in time on the backs of their sacrifices, and each freedom we have is a testament to them, their sufferings and their triumphs and I will not be the one whom gave up or took a single one for granted.
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