Hot Dogs and Freedom!

Hello all and Happy Independence Day!

By now, many if not most of you are well on your way to a grilled beef (or acceptable substitute) induced coma, which may or may not have been assisted by some sort of "lubrication liquid".  

Horse shoes, potato salad, and Bocci Ball may well have been involved also.

Later, as the sun sets and inebriation rises, there will be a frighteningly grand use of controlled explosives designed to look pretty in the sky.  

You know, drunk people and explosives.

'Merica!!

I hope this day has been and will continue to be an enjoyable time for you all.

However, in case one or two of you decided to step away from the hot dog for a second to actually read this (actually, you can probably continue to eat the hot dog AND read this at the same time.  if you can't, it's either a quite spectacularly good dog, or you've hit the second case of MGD already and you think this is a website dedicated to Lynard Skynard.  Unrelated, once you figure out this isn't that, I do recommend their song "The Breeze".  It's one of my favorites.), I thought it might be a good time for a short little thought on the topic of "freedom".

I'm not going to bore you about the subtle difference between the concepts of "independence" and "freedom", nor am I going to go on about the state of government and politics.  

I simply want to talk about what it means to be free.

Freedom can mean many things.  Are you free from oppression?  Free from slavery?  Are you free from tyranny?  Are you free from burdens?  Free from hate?  Are you free as opposed to being costly?  Does your "free-ness" or "freedom" come at the expense of someone else's "freedom"?  If so, then was it actually "free"?

Are you free from self-doubt?  Free from debt?  Free from depression?  Free from self delusion?  Free from all illusions?

Are you actually free or do you just think that you are free?

Or, can you be beholden to another but still feel free?  Is true freedom something that happens externally, or does it happen internally?

What does it actually mean to be "free"?

I'm not going to pretend to know the absolute meaning of this.  My words are simply that.  Words.  But I would like to offer at least one thing to consider, not as an absolute definition of truth, but as one thing that might be true in a basket of other true things.

Freedom, is a choice.  Not just the ability to choose, but more importantly, your choice to be free no matter your physical circumstances.  A person can be a prisoner, but be free inside, just as a person can be free from walls and barriers, but be trapped in a prison of their own mental design.

Have you chosen to be free?  In this land of relative freedom, and significant lack of overall oppression compared to many places, have you chosen to be free?  Truly free from the things that truly imprison us?

Things like hatred, bigotry, selfishness, vanity, arrogance, pride, ignorance...?  These things are all choices.  Sure, maybe you were exposed to and raised in environments that programmed certain things into your overall view of reality, but that does not mean you can't choose something better.

All those things, and others, are extensions of one of the greatest prisons.

Lies.

The lies we chose to believe, and even worse, the lies we told ourself.  Lies about who we are and what our significance is or is not.  About why I'm better or worse than you.  About what why I hate you.  About why I'm angry.  About why I'm trapped in life.

Lies that I choose to believe so that I may willfully remain ignorant.

Ignorance.  Another great and evil choice.  I realize that there are some places where this is not necessarily a choice, but here, in our country, in the age of information and the internet and access to almost anything we want to find?  Ignorance is a willful choice.

I meet these people all the time.  People who want life no other way than to be negative and hateful and arrogant and ignorant.  People who have woven great lies and believed them into their soul.

But, there are other people.  Greater people.  People who've chosen to be free.  People who love unreservedly.  Who hate no one even if they disagree with them.  People who don't believe they are better than that other person who lives in a way they don't believe in.  People who seek to understand in spite of the difficulty of bridging the gap between bigotry and brotherhood.

Those people are awesome.  Those are the people who've chosen freedom.  Those are the people who have chosen to make their life one of happiness and fellowship.

Those are people I want to know.  They are the people I call brothers and sisters and kinsman and countrymen.  And I don't care what nation or bloodline they came from.

That's because freedom by it's very nature is about the absence of boundaries.  The absence of confines.  If not in body, then in mind and soul.

I live in a country that is both wonderful and imperfect.  In that sense, it's much like every other country.  With aspects of both wonder and imperfection.  And, we do have it better here than in many places in the world.  It's a country based on the principles of independence and freedom and equality, even if the reality has at times fallen short.  But there is one thing that must be understood very clearly.

This country is not what makes you free.

You are the only one who can make you free.

Now, go blow something up in the name of awesomeness!

'Merica!!