Freedom, and related musings.

It's late nights (or extremely early mornings?) like this that get me thinking. This time, it's about freedom. What is freedom? In the absolute, freedom is simply the lack of restriction. Freedom does not entitle an individual to DO anything, it only protects others from limiting said individual. In the modern sense, freedom is the lack of an overt system of control. What we call free seems to change from day to day.

No longer does freedom apply as a unilateral term addressing our lives. Instead, freedom seems to have been sectioned, and portioned off in smaller sections. For example, an individual is free to drive whichever car they like. We see here freedom of ownership. In a unilaterally free system, we would see this also apply to guns, as well as any other object. Instead, our modern system has chosen to apply freedom to only aspects which do not interrupt the norm, or shatter the perfect script of our daily routine.

So what do we do with this? We can keep freedom sectioned off, and go about our daily lives, all the while allowing small chips to fall away from the grand statue of our liberty. We can ignore those little chips, such as the PATRIOT act. Or we can take a proactive stance, and begin gathering knowledge, and preparing for change. We can begin to pick the chips off the floor, and re-establish our freedoms in a move unlike anything our world has experienced.

Or maybe I just spent too much time thinking about the movie I just watched, V for Vendetta...