One of the things that becomes apparent quickly when talking with some people who have strong feelings about freedom is that they’re almost never truly concerned with actual civic freedom in any meaningful way. They aren’t interested in any of the things that make us free—the power to vote, to redress grievances, to organize against more powerful opposition in order to make the pursuit of happiness more likely for regular people. What they want is to live under the assumption that they have the right to make everyone else get out of the way so they, as an individual, can do whatever they like without any thought or obligation to the rest of the community. When it comes to things like rules or laws, they want the protections without the responsibility or obligations.
A good example of this phenomenon are dog owners who let their dogs off leash in places where leashes are expected and required. Responsible dog owners are familiar with this frustrating issue—especially when their own dog isn’t friendly to other animals and when we consider that the off leash people seldom have any real control over their pet. The person breaking the rule expects the people following the rule to make way and will get angry at the person whose dog is leashed when warned about the keeping the dogs separated. One gets the impression these off leash people are also the ones who either don’t clean up after their dog or leave bags of shit on the trail for someone else to clean.
We saw (see?) the same thing throughout the pandemic. The people who wanted to access essential services without feeling any obligation to the people required to face the public every day expected that they (a distinct minority in many cases) should be given the space to enact their antisocial tantrums while the rest of us remained silent, uncritical, and gave them the space to which they already feel entitled. The sheer number of public meltdowns followed by funeral GoFundMe pages or impassioned pleas to take the pandemic seriously by the same people who didn’t take COVID seriously after they ended up on a ventilator never seemed reach the folds of their friends’ entitled brains. People just kept melting down at Trader Joe’s like toddlers denied a toy.
After another mass shooting, this time on the same day the nation celebrates whatever we think of as freedom, we see the people whose identity requires they own AR platform rifles already freaking out at the idea that they may find themselves inconvenienced by the main thing the US gun violence issue requires: a consistent federal-level regulation. The rest of us are expected to make space for their unimpeded hobby based on remarkably ahistorical interpretations of the second amendment built more on faith than fact.
I started thinking about this last night as I saw 4th of July ordinance exploding in the skies around my home, each sky-burst, by legal standards, a felony. My phone started pinging with air quality alerts before 10 pm. We’d had kids over for a hot dog grill whose excitement about the fireworks was legitimately contagious, causing me to soften somewhat at the barrage. I was enjoying the show until someone launched a firework that exploded into a massive globe of sparks directly above my house. I watched as glowing cinders drifted onto my roof and felt hot debris pelting my skin. This brought me back to reality and the fact that my home—the first and probably only home I’d expect to own—might be the cost of a “freedom” this person didn’t actually possess. Unless we count this felony offense as ultimately unenforceable in a sky full of crimes. I thought about the effort we’d put into mitigating risk—staging fire extinguishers strategically for easy access. Soaking the yard in water. And then considered all the sneering online posts from “freedom lovers” making fun of combat veterans and pet owners who don’t have fun on fireworks days.
What these people, with their individualistic and selfish ideologies seem to share, is that they don’t value (or even know) what freedom really means and aren’t interested in protecting it. They don’t know the history of their freedoms or how many of them came at the cost of US civilian lives. This isn’t a crowd that cares about the steady stream of rights being gaveled to death in the Supreme Court. Especially the big ones: rights to vote, to have those votes counted, to representation, and equal rights under the law. They’re weirdly fine with giving oligarchs the ability to strip every citizen of power and don’t associate freedom with the responsibility of bequeathing expanded (and protected) freedoms to their descendants (along with a world in which to live in those freedoms). People who think of freedom as the right to do asshole behavior without any repercussions become easily manipulated single-issue voters who can’t see all their important freedoms walking out the door as they vote to keep themselves from inconvenience. (Assuming they use this freedom at all.)
Some people are fine with losing these freedoms as long as the people they don’t like are losing them more. These are the people who refer to democratically elected governments they don’t like as “dictatorships” and start plots to kidnap governors. Anyway, this is what I started thinking about as burning ash pelted my face and glowing embers landed on my roof.