The genius of America was in the ideal of liberty, justice, and that man had inalienable rights that was written into the social doctrine of this countries rule of law. Despite the fact that it was written by social elites and slave owners who didn't want to pay taxes to the English King, and that in the process there were several million indigenous peoples driven to extinction in the process of creating this country, there were seeds of something bigger, many of those ideas coming from those very same indigenous cultures, that hinted at a larger issue that we still face today.

What does it mean to be free? Is freedom simply a writ of law? Or is it in our cultural values? Or is it in our opportunities afforded us by economics? What does it mean to be free not just in this country, but in all countries? And is it something that can be exported like cheese wiz and blue jeans?

The answer, I feel, comes not from our sensations of freedom, but in our acknowledgment of oppression. Because the concept of freedom is still tied to it's opposite, that of being oppressed. There are countries where oppression is the accepted norm, and people go about their business with that concept in their mind. If you would ask them if they are free, they may say, yes, we are free. And if you question them further about the impositions the government and elites impose upon their lives, they may say, well they take care of us, or that's just the way it's always been, or that's the rule of law, or the word of god, or if we did not have government then there would be anarchy.

All those explanations fall short of what is really at issue, is that how much of our freedom is determined by others, and to what extent is that freedom limited.

One of the simpler explanations I've heard is that: "The freedom to swing my arms, ends at the tip of your nose". Quite frankly, a free society does must have the knowledge that individual freedom is limited only by everyone else's freedom. But what happens when one group's freedom is given a higher priority than another's. What happens with the dubious malefactor, power, comes into play. Then freedom is limited only to the extent of those who have power to limit that freedom, for the benefit of their own. Then we move from the more general sense of freedom, to the more specific concept of privilege.

Privilege is an extension of freedom beyond the tip of ones nose. And with any privilege, there is a price. If the price is not settled at the outset of the gain of privilege, the price manifest's itself in other forms. Often it is results in, shall we say, the dis-privileged trying to extract various privileges from others, who in turn repeat the process to try and compensate for their curbed freedom, which then becomes a common practice and is accepted in rule of law, and is seen as the natural state of man.

But it is not natural. Freedom is defined as not being under another's control, and in any state where privilege is prevalent this is not the case. The idealists of our age believed that freedom is the natural state of man, and that it is only limited by justice, which affords the same liberty to all people, limited to the individual only by the same equal liberty afforded by his fellow human beings (and I use human beings instead of the common term "man" or "men" to, of course make it clear that the gender issue should not be grounds for a limit on this concept. Call me PC, I say, fuck you at the end of your nose).

If we are to be truly free, can we do so without also acknowledging the freedom of our fellows, and respecting that same freedom as it is afforded ourselves? If we resort to the concept of dog-eat-dog, or might-make-right, or ends-at-the-barrel-of-a-gun, do we not by the same token, inhibit our own freedom even though we take it in the form of privilege? For as easily as privilege may be given, it may be taken away. We see that all the time, and people laugh heartily to themselves when they see the fate's of Louis the 14th, the Czar of Russia, or Paris Hilton. Because deep down we know when our freedom and liberty have been curbed, and we resent it, though we know not the source of that resentment. And those that receive privilege at the expense of other's freedom, eventually they realize they are the benefactors' of a grave injustice, and they either attempt to correct it, or they try to "justify" it through tricks of the mind or rule of law.

That is what has become of this country, and until we can resolve the nature of these root injustices and the oppression of freedom, even back to the original fore-father's who espoused these ideals, we will be unable to find a path that does not lead to our own demise.