I noticed this article linked from the Conservative Musing's weblog. I've seen the "freedom isn't free" line passed around so much that, even though I agree with it, I tend to ignore it for the most part. But in this case, the author is expressing it from a European viewpoint, which made me look at our country in a way I typically don't...
Enjoy!
- Graffy
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2 comments:
I'm always interested in what different people mean by "freedom isn't free". In our common political parlance today, which slants very conservative on issues of war, the "cost" of freedom means exactly that: war. Those who generally toss around the term "freedom isn't free" use it to justify our last two military invasions. It also seems to get used as a sop to justify curtailing certain individual rights, in the vein of the Patriot Act and the Terrorism Surveillance program. I think both of those are wrong.
I don't see how, from a collective national perspective, how using an all-volunteer force paid for by loans from China and Brazil equates to Americans as paying the cost of freedom as understood above. Nor do I see how surrendering the very rights that distinguish our culture from the more restrictive and authoritarian Middle Eastern nations demonstrates that either. If we Americans are truly as enamored with the intangible notion of "freedom", as the author of the article claims, then why are we getting tax cuts and why is our military failing to meet its recruitment goals?
I think the answer is a matter of understanding a complex ideal. Freedom means many different things to many different people and rallying even a plurality of the nation around any one understanding of such a multi-faceted ideal is impossible. I, for example, don't see one whit of freedom being implemented in any meaningful way by our debacle in Iraq. Others, like the Prez and his staff, obviously disagree (or at least say they do). As time goes on, I believe more folks are seeing it my way, frankly, and public opinion polls bear that out. Saying "freedom isn't free" as a way to justify a war under the circumstances by which the U.S. is fighting such strikes me as profoundly immoral.
When I think of what "freedom isn't free" means, I imagine, from a military perspective, all those millions conscripted to fight WWII. They fought to preserve our freedom, and that of our allies. I also think of those who have died in terrorist attacks, and will die in future attacks, because the U.S. was unwilling to take the draconian measures to stop such attacks. That's how freedom's price is paid: by recognizing that any average American may lose their life to a terrorist attack, such as 9/11, but that we're unwilling to give up the freedoms that put us in that mortal danger. Acknowledging freedom isn't free doesn't mean endless military aggression and a domestic police state. Quite the opposite. It means that our freedoms may cost some of us our lives, but that by curtailing those freedoms we are shirking that cost, not paying it.
Just my 1/50th of a dollar...
I must admit, I was intrigued by the European view of America that the author expressed (I guess it was incidental to his main message)... I found that more interesting than his viewpoint on "freedom isn't free".
In any case, I'm not certain how you can say that Iraq has no more freedoms today than it did before the war began - I know several military personnel who have served over there who could handily refute that.
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