We call our country “The Land of the Free” and we are right, however we erroneously tend to think that freedom exists only in the USA, and that is not true. Yes, there is a considerably large group of totalitarian regimes in the world. But there are also a few democracies.
Here again we get mixed up in the twilight world of semantics. This may sound chauvinistic, but freedom exists only in English. In any other language, the word is liberty (libertad, liberté, libertà, liberdade, Freiheit, etc.) and there is a big, important difference between the two words.
Freedom , if we look it up in the dictionary, has several meanings: “the condition of being free of restraint, liberty of the person from slavery, oppression or incarceration, political independence. However, the most important definition, the one that really sets us apart from the rest of the world, is: “possession of civil rights and immunity from the arbitrary exercise of authority.”
Liberty, on the other hand, is “the condition of being not subject to restriction or control, the right to act in a manner of one’s own choosing or the state of not being in confinement or servitude.”
Not easy to find a clear difference, huh? but for the last part about the civil rights and abuse of authority. That is actually what makes the big difference between our democracy and other democracies around the world.
“Free of restraint” has peculiar interpretations. Actually, everyone is free to do everything he wants (and can) anywhere in the world (as a Cuban refugee put it: as long as you are willing to pay the price).
Abuse of authority and lack of civil rights create an atmosphere of distrust. This leads to corrupt businesses, excessive bureaucracy, police abuse, etc. In countries that do not practice freedom, honest businessmen have to bribe officials, from customs inspectors to presidents, in order to gain some profit. The cost of bribes, of course, is passed on to customers, thus creating a neverending vicious cycle where everyone, but the rulers, is victimized.
When we talked about freedom, there is no wonder that we are often misread. We enjoy freedom. And I would bet, we know what freedom is, despite the statement, often heard abroad from refugees coming to our shores: “You don’t know what you have!”
Many peoples abroad are subjugated by the abuse of authority. It comes from every angle in their society: their government (federal, state, municipal) and from churches and other religious institutions. They admire our freedom, but not fully understanding our meaning of it, as restraint from abuse of power, they don’t know how to make it work.
They only have one word and that word does not include this definition. No other language defines freedom as freedom from abuse of authority and lack of civil rights. They miss they point because they get distracted by the sexual freedoms that we also enjoy.
People abroad interpret our freedom as unrestrained sex. This particular fashion of freedom mesmerizes them with our picturesque sexual revolution or the availability of pornography. They seldom see our sexual freedoms as a consequence of having civil rights. They see it as some kind of social allowance.
As any American can tell, this is obviously not true. Large segments of our population practice sex rules and mores that match the ones in fashion during the Middle Ages. If they tolerate (up to certain limits) liberal thoughts, it is only because they must respect civil rights. And from here, we could jump onto another fascinating subject...