Letters to the Editor: Mike Davis wrote about dark subjects, but he was full of light.
Thursday, December 14, 2010
So I want to know if one of you who read his letter can tell me what the hell the point of the letter is?
Davis writes:
“We have been told repeatedly that the United States is the land of the free.”
So.
Who exactly is telling us that?
And how can we be sure that the U.S. is the land of the free?
Davis says that the United States has “many things to be proud of, but one of the most important is freedom and opportunity for all people.”
I’ve been watching a few movies lately, and it’s kind of incredible how often the word freedom is used to describe a movie’s plot or characters.
I don’t get it.
You want to be free—you don’t want to be a slave; you want to be an autonomous human being.
If it were up to me, the land of the free would be a place where you could be free to do exactly what you want to do.
This is a country that protects freedom when everyone else around it is doing it for them.
There are very few people in any country that want to live in a country where they are under constant surveillance—where they can’t see the men in black and the men in white and the cars and the trucks and the planes, and the police.
We have people in this country who are under constant surveillance, and they have rights, too—we have no doubt of that.
And where do you suppose they get those rights?
They get them from this country.
They get them from the Constitution of the United States of America.
But even if freedom were an unalienable right—even if that were an absolute truth—then I’m afraid that most of our countrymen would not be prepared to fight and die for it.
When someone
