Do my fellow Americans actually despise freedom?
Our governments continue compromising our freedoms in order to expand their own powers, especially since ordinary citizens keep making that so easy for them to do.
Photo by Kristina V on Unsplash
by framersqool:
Do my fellow Americans actually despise freedom?
Which of course begs a great many more questions, as to what, instead, compels the actions and decisions, as well as inaction and indecision, of this mysterious and in my eyes mostly incomprehensible notion that there exists some 'American Way' which is apparently so desirable a thing to aspire to.
And of course, contrary to the simplistic challenges I have consistently received from fellow Americans over a lifetime whenever I have suggested that the conditions they accept have little to do with freedom, no, I don't have all the answers. No, I don't necessarily offer some comprehensive alternative one may simply open like a package from a store and put to immediate use.
But what has stumped and more often than not infuriated me all this time is the mass tendency to go along with each new behavioral trend issued by pop culture, to adopt each new shiny thing offered by consumerism and immediately begin to treat it as a necessity which cannot be done without. And even more bizarrely, to allow one's behavior to be entirely a product of the desire to conform at all costs, and yet somehow assert that to conform with the latest trend is somehow an expression of one's uniqueness as a person.
Why does anyone not only tolerate but enthusiastically embrace an emergent way of life, in which one is continually subject to multiple forms of surveillance? More than once I have heard one version or another of a very frightening rationale among my fellow Americans:
"If you aren't doing anything wrong, you should have nothing to hide."
The very same mindset, of course, which saw South African police under apartheid storming through neighborhoods of unimaginable squalor searching for dissenters against apartheid. Which sent squads of leather-jacketed Gestapo agents pounding on every door in town following a rumor that someone might be hiding Jews or downed Allied pilots. Which had two fine young men of no particularly fanatical persuasion demanding that I undress in front of them and bend over and cough while they stared at my asshole in the local county jailhouse.
After all, if I was not indeed hiding drugs or weapons in my rectum, why should I object to anyone checking just to make sure?
As I stood upright again and began to don the ill-fitting orange jumpsuit they handed me, I just sighed and sort of chuckled to myself, and said, 'what a sad thing, to see such decent young men turning themselves into robots.'
Which of course auto-cues the standard Nuremberg Defense:
'We're just doing our jobs.'
I was there because someone had aimed a high-end surveillance device at my license plate nine months before, and sent me a ransom demand in the mail based on its AI-generated search of my records which showed no evidence of liability insurance. Rather than capitulate to paying $174 and further agreeing to remain under surveillance by the state for another two years, neither condition having been submitted before nor approved by any court of law before being demanded of me by bureaucrats, I had sold my car, bought a bicycle, and told the bureaucrats they were quite welcome to take a long walk off a short pier but not before they got out of my face and fucked themselves.
It had been a classic Orwellian example of how two plus two must equal five: my assertion that the due process of law does not include bureaucracies acting as a law unto themselves had turned out to be the incorrect response, and for it, at that bureaucracy's convenience after a delay of nearly a year since my refusal to comply had engineered a secret arrest warrant my own town's police department claimed never to have been aware of, and I was hauled off to jail one winter night by a sheriff's deputy.
But which among us was truly free, in the booking office of the jailhouse? The ones who paid for their daily bread by staring up a grown man's asshole? The lady crew chief who mitigated her embarrassment over how she had failed to incite the proper bovine submission from me in front of her subordinates, by warning me that my cellmates might rape me in the showers if I keep up this 'attitude?' (Is there something about sodomy as a skillset and weapon of compelled compliance, that gets these people out of bed each morning?)
It's a powerful metaphor, of the idea that to live in accordance with whatever latest demands are placed on oneself by whoever or whatever has the power to demand them, is to bend over and take it.
Why do Americans have more respect for those who bend over and take it, as a means of sustaining their ersatz freedom of going along to get along, than those who refuse to on every occasion?
'Go ahead, make my day' has given way to 'go ahead and cuff me, would you like to look up my ass too?'
And I just still can't work out WHY.
framersqool
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.