Clearance Sale: This Week, Freedom

I’m about to voice another fairly unpopular opinion, but I’m also going to see if I can’t do so in a way that people find reasonable.

I cringe every time one of those inspirational quotes/stories comes around where the moral is that we owe all freedoms we have to the army.  Many of you have recently seen (or posted) the story about the teacher who has the desks taken out of her room and brought back in at the end of the day by lovely men in uniform..?  That’s been making the rounds (though I believe it’s gone around a few times and is some years old now).  There is a valuable message that I agree with in there.  I agree that appreciating the people who dedicate part or most of their lives to the defense of this country is a good thing.  I also think that appreciating the privileges we have is an excellent thing.  There are other implications, however, that don’t sit well with me at all.

The language of ‘You owe’ when being applied to the concept of ‘freedom’ is a troublesome concept for me.  As someone who is surrounded by capitalism, I’ve come to see these ideas, ‘owing’ and ‘free’ as opposed concepts.  When this line is introduced, it is almost always accompanied with something to the effect that soldiers have ‘paid’ for your freedom, but the word ‘owe’ makes it a sort of loan.  Because there is no other force or movement that is given ‘credit’ for the existence of our freedom, the only way to ‘earn’ it, is to join the military yourself.  The implication is that fighting, or at least being prepared to do violence in the name of your country, is the only worthwhile thing that a person can do in terms of having a right to the freedoms they enjoy.

The truth is that freedom sometimes must be physically fought for, but it is also fought for and earned (and not earned) in many different ways.  If you insist on putting it into terms of individuals to whom our freedom is owed then we also owe the picketers, the unions, and hell, we owe a ton of lawyers who have argued the letter of the law in an attempt to justly define freedom in a way that can be lived and sustained by modern society.  I am very glad that I’ve never had to sit through a tribute to lawyers and been told that I’m not a worthwhile citizen because I’m not one.  I am grateful for the existence of the legal profession and for the good done by them however, even as I acknowledge that some of them are terrible people.  I do exactly the same for the military.

In the end, people are people, and they either do good or evil, and usually they do a lot of both over the course of whatever years they have.  Many things are worthwhile, even if at first they don’t seem it.  Many things aren’t actually that worthwhile, even if at first they seem like the most important things in the world.  And sometimes, things are exactly what they seem to be, even if you’ve become so jaded that it’s hard to believe that anymore.  I applaud people who have done good- doubly so for those who were doing it for the good reasons.  I am grateful for the people whose efforts have made the world I live in better than it could have been- doubly so for those who are still trying to make things better even in the face of people telling them their efforts are unpatriotic.