Competing Freedoms

So I was asked if I had to live with only 3 freedoms which ones would I choose and why? 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….it’s 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, wiretapping 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.