Freedom

While the right wingnuts continue to moan about the dangers posed by terrorists, the real danger is to our freedoms…which are being eroded as I type. The last four years have seen our freedom to travel and to privacy curtailed like never before.

Travel by train has been problematic for years, because the infrastructure was never supported. I love train trips, but the schedules are so haphazard that they are not practical.

Travel by plane has been made so uncomfortable (not to mention expensive) that no one does it for pleasure any more.

And at well over $4.00 a gallon for gas, who can afford to drive anywhere?

The end result is a non-roaming, and therefore easier to control, population.

And it doesn't matter what the excuse was. Only the most naive fool would imagine that the reasons the government gives for high gas prices is any more honest or less self-serving than the reasons for going to war in Iraq, which have been thoroughly disproven even in the halls of Congress.

Even NPR, the liberals' darling, parrots "oil experts" who blather on about how gas prices are so high because of futures trading, the price of oil per barrel, and other nonsense. Meanwhile, the fact is that in Mexico gas is selling for about half what it costs consumers here. How do oil commodities markets not affect Mexico? The answer is, they do. So, that's not the reason for high gas prices.

How could it not have a direct relationship to Exxon-Mobile's $40 billion dollar profit in 2007, the largest of any corporation in the history of the world? And how is it possible that the mass media, if it is truly in the business of informing the public, hasn't hammered this point home?

The answer, of course, is that the mass media is not in the business of informing the public; it is in the business of misinforming the public on behalf of its owners, which include Exxon-Mobile and the other oil giants, as well as the manufacturers of weapons used in the war they encouraged us to support.

Freedom is a terrific ideal, but mouthing the word isn't experiencing the concept. The conservatives who brag about "freedom" and "America" and the "Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave" are the very first ones who want to limit who I am allowed to marry and what I may take with me on an airplane. Their bumper stickers brag, "These Colors Don't Run" but they support politicians whose policies have made it impossible for any of us to fly or drive, let alone run. And let's not even think about the veterans of this oil war, who thought they were fighting and being injured and maimed for their country when in reality it was just to restore oil rights to Exxon-Mobile and their partners.

Tomorrow is Independence Day. It's time to consider whether we really have independence. What are you truly free to do? Can you go where you want? Not in theory, but in reality. Can you do the work you want to, that you love? How many compromises have you had to make in your life in order to keep yourself fed, clothed and housed? If the answer is more than none, you are not truly free.

And if one wished to experience freedom, one must first identify to whom one is enslaved.