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Today's
quotation:
Total freedom is never what one imagines and, in
fact,
hardly exists. It
comes as a shock in life to learn that
we usually only exchange
one
set of restrictions for
another.
The second set, however, is
self-chosen,
and therefore easier
to accept.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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Today's
Meditation:
I do have to
laugh sometimes when I hear people talking about their
"freedoms." I think that most of us
realize that our freedoms are very limited, at best,
because one of the needs of society is to function
smoothly, and that tends to be impossible if everyone is
free to do just as they please all the time. What
most of us do is adapt our wants and needs to conform to
the rules of society, so that we feel free when we think
about what we want to do versus what we're allowed to do.
I
couldn't drive up to Canada without a passport. Yes,
I'm free to visit Canada (and I love doing so), but I'm
free only as long as I'm carrying that little booklet with
me. In some states, I can buy all the wine I want--
but not before 8 a.m., and not on certain days of
the week. I'm free to buy a car and travel wherever
I want within this country, but if I decide I want to
drive at certain speeds, I can expect to be penalized
severely-- up to having the license that allows me that
freedom taken away by the state, effectively depriving me
of that particular freedom.
I
know that most of us are fine with these restrictions on
our freedoms. After all, if all of our freedoms were
unlimited, the chances are very good that we'd all be
living in anarchic states that tend to be very violent, as
some people's ideas of freedom would definitely involve
harming others to take what they want when they want it or
to exact revenge whenever they feel like it. We only
have to read about many towns in the old West in the
United States to see what could happen when "law and
order" are absent from society.
Most
of us are willing to sacrifice a significant number of
freedoms so that the elements in society that would cause
harm are kept in check. And that's fine--
personally,
I would rather lose some freedoms and live in a safe place
than have all my freedoms and have to be afraid for my
life every day. That's called compromise, and we
compromise our freedoms every day-- and our compromise
helps to contribute to the greater good all the time.
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