Americans are among the most propagandized populace in the world. If you are one of the many whose initial reaction to this statement is, “are you kidding? Not me! Not in this free country!” I would argue that it simply proves the point. Americans are so successfully indoctrinated that for many people, they don’t even know it, indeed, they can’t even conceive of the possibility. This indoctrination takes many forms. Among the most pervasive is a near-complete perversion of much of the language of political and social discourse. Key terms have been so thoroughly abused that they have virtually become devoid of meaning. Perhaps no word has been so debased as “freedom.” Here in the “land of the free,” we bask in it, glorify it, heck, we even eat it with our “hamberders.”
So what are some of the freedoms that Americans are so uniquely endowed with among so-called wealthy and democratic nations? Let’s just enumerate some of the many actual freedoms that Americans presently enjoy:
1) The freedom to endure the only for-profit health care system in the industrial world. This cherished freedom grants you some of the following related freedoms. The freedom to pay the highest drug prices among comparable nations. The freedom to lose your health care when you become unemployed. The freedom to find health care completely unaffordable if you should happen to lose your job. The freedom to go bankrupt due to exorbitant health care costs, or the denial of treatment coverage by your insurance company. The freedom to see many of your fellow citizens unnecessarily die due to their lack of health insurance coverage. The freedom to contribute to the obscene, multimillion dollar compensations of insurance company executives, whose companies literally make a profit by denying health care coverage to their enrollees. Just think how much more these freedoms are cherished when a 100-year pandemic rolls around!
2) The freedom to live in a society with a decreasing life expectancy.
3) The freedom to work 2 or more jobs and still be one or two paychecks from destitution. This benefit also comes with added freedoms. The freedom to not have to worry about building up any savings. The freedom to lose your job if you get sick, because you have no sick leave. The freedom to not have to worry about where to go for vacations, because you have no paid leave. The freedom to work for a $7.25 an hour starvation wage. The freedom to have your labor taxed at a higher rate than income resulting from a financial transaction (a so-called capital gain). The freedom to pay higher taxes than the company you might work for (some of which pay no US Federal income taxes). Tough to beat that last one!
4) The freedom to go into perpetual debt in order to obtain a higher education. The freedom to pay outrageous interest rates on that debt.
5) The freedom to see your children struggle more and expect less out of life than you did.
6) The freedom to choose from a few, or in some cases, even a single cable/internet/phone provider, because 28 years after the break-up of AT&T, the telecommunications industry is still, effectively, monopolistic.
7) The freedom to pay among the highest rates for such telecommunications services (often with poorer service), than most so-called developed countries.
8) The freedom to stand in line for hours in order to vote, in the so-called "bastion of democracy."
9) The freedom to be shot dead by fellow citizens armed with military-style weapons.
and
10) After a year and a half, multi-billion dollar electoral shit-show, the freedom to vote for Tweedle-dumb or Tweedle-dumbest.
Truly, what more freedoms could one wish for?
