Freedom is relative ..

Before you assume that there is some typo in the title and I am trying to talk about any relatives, let me stop you right there!

This post is about "Freedom" and how it is not absolute. It is relative.

To make my point, take a healthy young lion living in a simple 20 square meter zoo cage. It probably feels oppressesed, trapped, etc. etc. and has definitely lost its freedom (in this case freedom of movement). Take the same lion and move it to the middle of a 20 acre park which has a simulated savannah and a fake lake with a few Gazelles which it can hunt every now and then. It probably feels free. It would not bother the lion that the 20 acre perimeter has electrified fences or other mechanisms which would endanger its life, far more than the boundaries of the cage, because as far as its eyes can see, it is "free to move"! It might feel trapped when it gets near the perimeter!

Now, who am I and what have I done to Sundar? Nothing really. While driving back from work today, my thought process, which is prone to wandering in the absence of enough caffeine, sugar or starch for a whole afternoon, went to explore the meaning of freedom. This thought was triggered (as many others in the past), by the public radio news report in the background which said that the President of the USA has asked the White House Counsel, Harriet Miers to ignore a subpoena and not show up for questioning! by a committee investigating the selective firing of Judiciary folks!

My sugar starved brain asked myself a few questions in the following order:

Is the President of the US above the Law ?
Can he actually tell who can and cannot show up when summoned by the Judiciary branch?
Is this because he IS the Law of the land?
Oh wait, wasn't that answer to that question "the constitution" ?
Did I not read my Citizenship test material right about the various branches of government?
Did we not hang a dude in another country in the name of bringing a former head of state to Justice and say things like "no one is above the law! and the laws of that country (which were practically rewritten by the USA) are holding that dude accountable for his actions" etc. etc. ?
Can any leader of any country be above the law of that land and not answer to the people or the law governing that land?

Well, the answer to the last question at least, is a big NO! We all saw how Saddam was brought to "Justice"!. Before you flame me and say "are you supporting Saddam ?" , "he was a dictator who deserved death", "he tortured and killed so many people" etc. etc. I will make it very very clear. This is not about Saddam's death being deserved or not, this is not a pro or anti Saddam Hussein point I am trying to make here (for the record, he deserved what was dished out by his own people!). It is purely to elucidate the fact he was held accountable for his actions by people in his country with their laws (at least according to the world media) with a lot of publicity for "no one is above the law in a democratic land! See what the power of demoscary.. er..democracy can do!".

What definitely strikes me as odd is that we in the USA are supposed to live in a :
Democracy,
Free Country,
Country ruled by the people,
etc. etc.

all of which are supposedly lacking in dictatorial, theocratic, third world nations, which is feeding the demand for "the democratizers" (think of them as Ghostbusters, except they look like ordinary military dudes without any cool gadgets, well.. they are ordinary military dudes!) aka "liberators", "peacekeepers", "nation rebuilders", etc. etc.

This freedom is very weak and definitely "relative". It is more a perception of freedom than freedom itself, much like the case of the lion in a fake safari! When pushed to the boundaries, this freedom is as fickle as the freedom in those third world countries. How else can you explain what is happening today? A majority of the populace is struggling to implement a plan to end an occupation in a foreign land, but is really impotent as long as one man has enough power to just do what he feels like doing?

I do not know! I am still new to this constituion thing and I know I have a lot of catching up to do! Sometimes when I think that a big part of my salary which goes in taxes is directly being spent on buying one way tickets to the middle east for American kids who do not have any other options after high school, or kill Iraqi innocents in the name of liberating them, I have difficulty sleeping.

So what is the freedom that I still have? I have the Freedom of the Mouse and Keyboard! I could still write this post and put it on the internet! I can tell the Gallup poll guy (who always calls me in the evening exactly when I am asking god, why he gave me only two hands and not four to handle two kids) that I do not support the war and I want the American troops back!

I can voice my opinion that instead of sending those kids who joined the services because of a lack of other choices, to die in Iraq, give them interest free loans to get college degrees or better give them a free higher education! As for those kids that really went to the Armed services because that was their calling, instead of rebuilding Iraq, ask them to support rebuilding of all those ghost towns in the USA which have lost their local economy to international competition and start securing this country at its own borders. There are plenty of people still sneaking across all borders who could be a threat to national security (if we are to believe the same world media).

Now that I have written this, I can stop thinking of myself as a toothless lion and go run around in my fake grassland.

Give me a F
Give me a R
Give me some E's..

Gooooooooooooooo FREE country!!

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