End your programming, do things that matter.
This is a special episode that I only did because the subject was pilgrims. I got to thinking that they came here for a reason. This is the beginning of my succession to ‘Tacticool’ Thursday.
Now, of all of the colors and symbols on the ‘Pride‘ flag, I don’t see Pilgrims as one of them… people should be thankful that they broke the law between required church attendance and citizenship otherwise there would a lot more executions abound.
This week marks the half way point in the values that make up the American Dream. Hopefully, this week will be a little easier to quantify than rights last week.
I suppose the best place to start is the origin of the concept. According to Wikipedia, the idea came from ancient Greece. Essentially it meant to not be a slave. That is pretty plain, either you are a slave or you have liberty. The word itself is derived from the Latin word Libertas. Libertas was a Roman goddess representing liberty. The likeness has been used in France on money and was the inspiration for the Statue of Liberty.
Now that that is done, we can look a little deeper into what it means today. If we strictly take the Greek concept, we are not slaves. If you look a little harder, notice that doesn’t mean there are no laws, it means that we are free to operate within the laws that exist. And if we go back to last week, laws in theory should be based on our rights. In theory, laws should support or strengthen our rights and never restrict them.
I don’t want to get too far out of bounds with rights again this week, however you cant have liberty without recognized rights. It would seem that in reality, Rights are far more important than Liberty. Rights are going to define the boundaries that we can operate with said Liberty.
Do we have Liberty today? I actually think that we do for the most part. The notion that someone is doing something that we don’t want them to do, we enact a law preventing it. So, we are still free to operate within with the realm of legal, we just keep redefining what that means.
I think about all of the places that I have been, I would offer up China as an example. I am not an expert, but I am pretty sure Liberty is not among their cultural entitlements. Are the people slaves – no. Can they operate within the laws of municipality – yes. Are the laws applied universally – of course not and nowhere else (including the United States) for that matter. Do they have liberty – by that definition yes.
Just using that example above, it sort of downplays the importance of Liberty. The only situations I could think of where liberty would be a problem is when the boundaries are changing without the knowledge of the population or selective enforcement. In which case, people exist at the whim of the rulers or maybe we could call them slaves.
End Your Programming Routine: I really didn’t think that this was going to go this way. I suppose that I was because I had never really taken a deep dive into the definitions. I thought that I knew what I was talking about without truly understanding.
I have to admit that when I hear the word ‘Liberty’ one of two images come up immediately. They are either Libertas (sometimes the statue of Liberty) or the liberty eagle. Those are the signs of programming and invoke emotion rather than thought and understanding. I am not saying that I don’t want Liberty but now I know it’s place in the hierarchy.
I ran across this article the other day. I am a sucker for articles about North Korea because I like to see the type of shenanigans that are happening. But I never drew the conclusion that the same kind of tactics that North Korea uses are showing up here.
This is an article written about an North Korean defector that is now a student at Columbia. Her name is Yeonmi Park and has even written a book about the escape. This is definitely something I am interested in looking into.
Yeonmi has some quotes that are just spectacular.
“The people here are just dying to give their rights and power to the government. That is what scares me the most,” the human right activist said.
She accused American higher education institutions of stripping people’s ability to think critically.
“In North Korea I literally believed that my Dear Leader [Kim Jong-un] was starving,” she recalled. “He’s the fattest guy – how can anyone believe that? And then somebody showed me a photo and said ‘Look at him, he’s the fattest guy. Other people are all thin.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God, why did I not notice that he was fat?’ Because I never learned how to think critically.”
“That is what is happening in America,” she continued. “People see things but they’ve just completely lost the ability to think critically.”
For some reason, WordPress is limited to embedding media within certain sources. And Fox News is not one of them. I really encourage you to take a look at the entire piece if you are into the subject. I half expected to not find it two weeks later, but it is still there.
End Your Programming Routine: Make no mistake that I think Fox News is any more a beacon of liberty than CNN or MSNBC. Remember, it is the other side of the dichotomy so they work hand in hand with their counterparts in advancing the machine. However, this one is a gem.
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