Freedom for One
Uninhibited and Alone
Freedom may be the centerpiece of our American culture. We sing of it, wave flags to it. Growing up, it was a point of pride—should we lose everything else, we’d have that.
Against that backdrop, I have watched our better angels grow in voice and volume, celebrating rights and condemning failures to make freedoms available to all.
Because, as free people, we can…
live the lives we imagine.
choose how and where and with whom we spend our days.
say what we think
do what we will
make our own individual ways
However…
A slippery slope of preference and expectation has led many of us to understand our freedoms in terms of rights to optimized individualized experience. For years I laughed at the specific vehemence of “personal coffee orders.” Today, individualized voice and choice has become freedom for ME before - or instead of - WE.
“You Americans see everything through an individual lens,” my professor said, years ago. Raised in Norway, she saw different possibilities, different responsibilities.
I was told her words were indoctrination, because our liberty has increasingly paired with encouragement to put oneself first - in health and safety, in spending, in use of time, in how, what, and where to communicate, with whom to maintain relationship.
But when it’s me vs. you vs. us vs. them, and my right to my way crosses your right to yours, what then?
I lament the “uninhibited individualism” we’ve unleashed.
More than ever, people celebrate individual rights without inhibition.
Social media provides a venue for folks to say whatever they want whenever they want. Our culture elevates “My way or the highway” “Be yourself!” “Believe in yourself!” “I got mine!” “You do you!”
And in-divid-ualized, we are divided.
In division, we are lonely.
Community requires rights AND responsibilities. So…
I lament responsibilities lost.
I lament those who celebrate individual beliefs, as if they were the only believers.
I lament the way some have traded a responsibility to educate and persuade for an underhanded “right” to belittle by “schooling” others to “own” an argument.
Where a right to speak out is viewed as a pathway to punch - whether upward to power or downward to need - we have lost consideration for any world that is “not me.” But everyone is “not me.” “Not me” is the whole world.
So while freedom remains, it is increasingly freedom for one. It doesn’t feel freeing.
For a perspective that centers wonder and whimsy rather than lament…