What Liberty is Not

It’s as inevitable as a great TV show being canceled by Fox Television after the first three episodes, or your brand new puppy peeing on your brand new carpet.

You’re sitting in your car at an intersection waiting patiently for permission from the traffic light to once again tromp down on that skinny pedal to the right side of your foot. Your not in too big of a hurry so you are kind of enjoying the ambience of the surrounding city life, and aren’t too pissed at having to wait for red to change to green. Life is good.

Until the Moron shows up.

You don’t hear it at first. Instead, you feel it. A kind of vibration that’s different from the one you feel from your car’s engine. This one’s repetitive. Thump, thump, thump, thump. And it gets louder and louder. You look over to your right and sure enough, there he is. The Moron. You know. The guy that sees it as his life mission to share the power of his buhzillion watt car stereo with the surrounding neighborhood — 40 blocks away.

With mouth agape you continue to stare at this idiot as he bounces up and down, back and forth to the throbbing beat that’s loud enough to loosen the bricks of the surrounding buildings. The worst thing is it isn’t even music. It’s some whacked up jerk spouting really bad sexually oriented poetry to a migraine producing beat that sounds more like a factory machine rather than something produced by a human being.

Finally, after an aeon, the change to green from red is complete. You let the Moron go first, desperately hoping that by doing so the misery of his presence will disappear off into the sunset. Besides you’re kind of afraid that if you follow too close, the continual thumping will eventually shatter your windshield.

Where do these guys come from?

Unfortunately, they are all over the place, at least in the US. They’re like those ants in Africa who march by the millions destroying everything in their path. Only these guys wreak sonic chaos everywhere they take their stereo-laden vehicles.

And they provide a perfect demonstration of what liberty is not.

You see, our Founding Fathers knew something that we in the “enlightened” yet arrogant 21st century have apparently forgotten: OTHER PEOPLE ARE JUST AS IMPORTANT AS WE ARE.

Ok. I’ve calmed down, and I know that this is a bit of a shock. Perhaps a drink will help. I’ll wait for you to pour one (I’ve already poured mine), then let’s sit down and think about this for a minute.

I suppose the one word that characterizes the American mentality today is “entitlement“. “I have a right to…,” seems to come out of everybody’s mouth waaaaay to often now-days. The Moron insists that he has a right to play his music as loud as he wants, anywhere he wants. Stock holders insist that they have a right to bigger and bigger profits. The blue collar worker insists he has a right to a livable wage and that he has a right to adequate health care.

These things may or may not be true. We could debate them for days. But such a debate is irrelevant. It misses a very large point.

The Moron’s right to play his music as loud as he wants, anywhere he wants, stops where my right to quiet begins.

Now we have a conflict, and that conflict must be resolved. It will be resolved, and it will be resolved in one of two ways. Either through respect, or through force. It will be resolved voluntarily or by coercion. Liberty is not liberty if we continually insist on our rights at the expense of everyone else. If we go down that road we become barbarians at best and tyrants at worst.

When we insist on our right to adequate health care and insist on paying for it by taking part of some else’s hard earned money without their consent (through increased taxation, or the hidden taxation called inflation), we have chosen to resolve our conflict through the use of coercion. We have become tyrants and thieves.

The emphasis of our founders was not on our rights as such, but on the fact that all men stand equally in those rights. They knew that in order for this to work we must respect each other equally. We must learn to negotiate and to compromise at times. Liberty to be a blessing to all, will at times require limitations.

Our founders hoped and believed that conscience and wisdom would provide self-imposed limitations. Without that, the only way to provide the necessary limitations would be to enforce them, which would lead us right back to King George.

What we must remember at the outset as we begin this look into our freedoms is that liberty is not license and that it carries serious responsibilities.

Picture by flicker user johnmarchan under Creative Commons License. Use of this picture does not constitute an endorsement by johnmarchan of the ideas in this post.

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