Woman wearing “Trump Girl” t-shirt says,

“I would also like to know where do you get the authority to reduce my oxygen, it’s a conspiracy to take away my freedom.”

Freedom does not mean you are free to do as you please and put lives at risk.

In America you are free to

Pursue happiness, you are not blatantly entitled to happiness and that it automatically comes to you. Freedoms are restricted by laws for the COMMON GOOD. Freedom is not a license to do whatever you want. True freedom comes with the responsibility to choose wisely whom or what

we will serve.
Freedom does not give license to pursue arrogant, ungrateful self-centeredness. It is our ability to choose self-sacrifice for the sake of virtue (good) and then have the freedom to choose how to direct the benefits received from our virtue?

You choose to do things that harm others to get your own way, you are yielding to immaturity and carelessness, a poor attitude that shows a lack of respect for humanity, both for others and for yourself, by not being the person you could be that makes the world better, not worse.

Freedom always comes with a price, and that price is responsibility.

If you try to take your liberties without paying that price, others around you will pay it in your stead.

You can imagine yourself “free” to seek your own self-interest without regard to the effect of your actions on others - as many do, only to then wonder why happiness and peace of mind escapes them.

You are free to do what you want as long as you don’t harm anyone else or violate some basic concepts. Freedom, in a civilized and mature society, means being free to be and act and think and express who you are without government repression .. as long as you are not destructive

or impinging on the rights of others to do the same. Freedom presupposes that society is made up of mature adults, which is obviously not the case.

It is extremely naive to believe you are entirely free. For safety, for national security, for protection as a people we sign

a social contract with the Leviathan. The government can see what you checked at your library. There are invasive checks at the airport, you give up these freedoms because it’s for the common good of all Americans. Some Americans have a very warped idea about what freedom means

In so much as they dislike the absolute freedom of BLM to protest as this is not harmful, bit essential, whereas they just want the freedom to harm others. It’s childish and dangerous. You are not free to danger others like a drunk driver near a school playground. Yes you are

to do it, but there are consequences because this type of freedom is immoral freedom and there are prices to pay for immoral freedoms. The warped modern version of liberty was sold to them, first by right-wing public intellectuals like Ayn Rand, who killed thousands of

trees to wrap unbridled selfishness in her endless tomes about freedom, and later by the salesmen of Big Capitalism. Protecting your freedom became the ideal branding for what these pitchmen really wanted, which was political cover to dramatically lower taxes on

millionaires (who, thanks to that, would become billionaires), and to crush unions and their demands for higher pay, freeing up profits to now pay CEOs 350 times what the average worker makes. Talk about finding the cost of freedom! With the help of

academics like the Nobel economist James McGill Buchanan, backed by billionaires like the Koch brothers, warped freedom capitalism got a fancy name — free-market libertarianism. But by the 1970s, their new form of snake-oil salesmanship was threatened by the avatars of a

newer “knowledge economy.”
America has botched the coronavirus because of its botched ideas of freedom and is the only country that holds science in such low self-esteem. America is anti-science because science gets in the way of making money. It’s perverse and stupid.

In a functioning society, freedom can flourish when it’s part of a broader social compact, when liberty is not abused because its practitioners also see themselves as part of a community, where they care about others, even, or especially, when it comes to wearing a mask and not

spreading germs to your neighbor. But has there ever been a branding campaign as successful as America repackaging selfishness, self-interest, and extreme inequality as personal freedom? Fox’s Rupert Murdoch to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who made bigger profits off of lies and

unchecked conspiracy theories than off of fact-checking in the public interest. The filth of Zuckerberg’s Facebook is what’s spewing, unmasked, from the self-styled, so called “patriots” that don’t care about their fellow Americans.

Over the last 50 or so years, much of what conservatives have hyped as threats to personal liberty was really proposed checks on white (or male) privilege. This toxic blend of narcissism and white privilege is Trump’s idea of leadership — even as he leads some of his voters to

an early grave. The flip side is that the millions who’ve marched in America’s streets after Floyd’s murder — many, although not all, from the under-35 generation — are making the case that a better world, built around empathy and compassion for people who don’t look like

ourselves, is coming. They are using their freedom of speech and assembly to forge a more perfect union.