How Free is Free?!

Not to over elaborate on Dane Cook’s “absolutely free” joke (no, I’m not repeating it), but the man has a point! How free IS free? When you wake up in the morning, what are some of your MAIN concerns? Answer that in your own space, but do it in front of a mirror….out loud, so you can hear how it sounds.

My point is the fact that we as human being have been fighting for rights pretty much since we began calling ourselves “civilized”. The Women’s Suffragette Movement, the Civil Rights era, LGBTQ rights, and so forth. Think about it. If we the people who live in the so-called “Land Of The Free” were indeed free, what would there exist to fight for? Why are the indigenous peoples of this beautiful land fighting with people who aren’t from here over something that, conceptually can belong to no one?

Why, at all, are there even fights for rights if we are so “free”? Seems like there are more than a few quite obvious contradictions between the way we live, and the way it is written that we should live. It seems as though there are questions, lots of questions that this country has been attempting to distract this generation from.
Be not discouraged, nor distracted in the least. For this is the generation most poised to not only ask the tough ones, but come up with the answers that will shape what we question, going forward.

My answer is is that we aren’t free. We aren’t even close to free. Not by a long shot! As a heterosexual, not so young African-American man, I’m not free until all my homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, transgendered, or any of the other wonderfully created, self-sufficient, able-bodied beings we share this very unique planet with are free to marry, or not marry whomever they choose.

THAT, my friends, is my point. How free is free, when some of us are under direct threat of deportation due to their means of arrival into a land which, technically, belongs to them anyway? How free is free when the guilt I feel while holding the hand of the woman I hope to, and can lawfully marry, is palpable; yet only exists because my best friend and her long time girlfriend may or may not ever be able to, depending on the state they live in?! How free is free, when, as a parent sharing the same fears as most other parents, I have to warn my young sons (when I have some) that even though they may dress smartly, speak eloquently, walk with their heads high, and never hang around the wrong crowds, they still stand a pretty decent chance of being targeted by racially biased police officers for stop and frisks, at best. And, at worst, possibly gunned down by those we trust to uphold the law?! 

How free, indeed! For, if one of us is not free, none of us are!