Freedom

Being an American automatically means being an expert in freedom, yes? We take pride in being the "Leaders of the Free World", of supporting freedom and democracy in the "developing world", and of our efforts an "building" democracies after toppling tyrants. (That last isn't working out so well, but we had good intentions, yes?) We are a freedom loving people, demanding our civil rights (though we are often slow in granting other people their civil rights) and making sure we have enough weapons on hand to protect those freedoms from all "enemies, foreign and domestic". (We are particularly afraid of the "domestic" ones though we gladly sacrificed a bunch of our freedoms so the NSA could protects us from some of those "foreign" ones.)

Then I turned in my "American Consumer" card and am now on the verge of living one of those "alternate" lifestyles people love to talk about without understanding much about them. Closing down an entire way of living, making a 180 degree turn, and taking up an entirely new way of living is the biggest challenge I have ever undertaken. There is no aspect of my life that isn't being drastically altered, all the way down to the kinds of shoes I put on my feet. The changes in my world view are even more dramatic than those of my wardrobe, and it turns out I didn't know nearly as much about "freedom" as I assumed.

Like most Americans now days I have had several jobs taken away from me. In every case we faced a near iminate disaster. Kids needed food and clothes, a roof over their heads, and medical care. The way I provided those things for the people I loved had been snatched away by "changing markets" or "right sizing" or because "things just aren't working out". It was bullshit. In almost every case someone figured they could make themselves just a tiny bit richer by taking something away from others. In some cases I found another job nearby; in others the family was uprooted and moved hundreds or thousands of miles to another job. Jobs that, in many cases, were then taken away yet again. We did okay in spite of these repeated assaults; partly by dogged hard work, partly by a determination to survive, and partly by luck. Not everybody gets the luck they need and more and more are becoming casualties in our failing society.

And then they came and took my last, and in some ways my best, job away. It was good pay. It had good benefits. It had a matching 401K program. Me doing my job well made it easier for other people to do their jobs well. But someone decided that taking my job away and making those other people work that much harder to do their jobs would make that someone just that little bit richer and (in this particular case) prove to some other rich people just who was really in charge. That they were hurting people who had done them no harm, people who, in fact, had given them their best efforts, didn't matter at all. It was ugly. It was evil. When the revolution comes it wouldn't bother me at all if the someones lose everything; end up pushing a shopping cart down the street wondering which bridge will keep the rain off of them this night. Evil is as evil does and those who have pushed thousands of working Americans into the ranks of being poverty stricken have no complaint coming when the devil knocks on their door and hands them an eviction notice.

But in my case (and sadly, so far as I know, my case alone in this particular corporate event) we do not face the looming disaster of other jobs that had been taken ... for I was about to give this one back to them. And I discovered a big part of freedom I never knew existed; that of not being threaten with a job loss. My ability to care for those I love no longer depends on the whims of those who would hurt me with casual indifference so long at it puts a few more pennies in their pockets. I can go about my business without being threatened by business.

Freedom, it turns out, is found by walking away from the American Dream.