I've been wanting and trying to write about "freedom" for the past several years, but this piece is so spot-on that I think I'll just make a pdf and send that out instead. In our house, so disgusted are we by the whole MAGA invocation of "FREEDOM!" to justify all sorts of repression and destruction that we started barking out the word to…
I've been wanting and trying to write about "freedom" for the past several years, but this piece is so spot-on that I think I'll just make a pdf and send that out instead. In our house, so disgusted are we by the whole MAGA invocation of "FREEDOM!" to justify all sorts of repression and destruction that we started barking out the word to each other, sardonically, with raised fist, every time the latest Orwellian contortion of it came up in the news.
But the bigger distress is not the "freedom" jihad of the MAGAs but the spillover onto some of our leftist friends, who have come to believe that, so long as the "deep state" and the "global cabal" have their hooks in us, none of us can be "free." They see virtually all regulations and mandates as nefarious. I ask them whether it should be OK to ignore "Stop" signs or, for that matter, drive on whatever side of the road you, in your full embrace of "freedom," feel like driving?
And I wonder why for me, as physically uncomfortable as it can be, I feel no more oppressed by a mandate to wear a mask indoors during a pandemic than I do by being required to stop at a Stop sign or drive on the right side of the road in the USA -- while for them it is "tyranny." What is it that makes us so different in our assessment of what freedom is and what oppression and tyranny are?
Raised fist, yelling "Freedom", I'm reminded of Mr. Costanza, George's Dad, on Seinfeld, yelling out "Serenity now!" It never seemed to help him attain serenity though, likewise the freedom that deSantis and others are proclaiming.
I've been wanting and trying to write about "freedom" for the past several years, but this piece is so spot-on that I think I'll just make a pdf and send that out instead. In our house, so disgusted are we by the whole MAGA invocation of "FREEDOM!" to justify all sorts of repression and destruction that we started barking out the word to each other, sardonically, with raised fist, every time the latest Orwellian contortion of it came up in the news.
But the bigger distress is not the "freedom" jihad of the MAGAs but the spillover onto some of our leftist friends, who have come to believe that, so long as the "deep state" and the "global cabal" have their hooks in us, none of us can be "free." They see virtually all regulations and mandates as nefarious. I ask them whether it should be OK to ignore "Stop" signs or, for that matter, drive on whatever side of the road you, in your full embrace of "freedom," feel like driving?
And I wonder why for me, as physically uncomfortable as it can be, I feel no more oppressed by a mandate to wear a mask indoors during a pandemic than I do by being required to stop at a Stop sign or drive on the right side of the road in the USA -- while for them it is "tyranny." What is it that makes us so different in our assessment of what freedom is and what oppression and tyranny are?
Raised fist, yelling "Freedom", I'm reminded of Mr. Costanza, George's Dad, on Seinfeld, yelling out "Serenity now!" It never seemed to help him attain serenity though, likewise the freedom that deSantis and others are proclaiming.