Freedom Perceived as.......


America is known for being the beacon of freedom in the world. What is freedom to you? We often don't look back enough to remember how freedom was viewed by others. Times have changed, so has freedom!

Old Freedom

In class we read a piece by Fredrick Douglass written in the 1800s about the Fourth of July holiday. He viewed that independence, being the object of the holiday was skewed and hypocritical. According to him, many white American celebrates their "Freedom", yet they took away the freedom of African Americans and treated them as 'subhuman'. As time passed, more and more people fought for their freedom.  Freedom have come a long way in the history of America. From being slavery in plantations to being one of the most powerful and influential man in the world, the president of the United States of America.

In The Partly Cloudy Patriot  Sarah Vowell talks about the movie called 'The Patriot', she compares the characters in the movie to real life people. "Mel just risked his life so that that kid's kids can rape their slaves and vote to be the first state to secede from the Union".  This old concept of selfish freedom allowed some to deprive others. Both Douglass and Vowell allude to the duplicity of true equality in America. Although we have grown out of our old ideology, its best to look back and reflect on how those were built!



Modern Freedom 
Can freedom come from simply within ourselves? Absolutely! In class we also read This is Water by David Wallace which gave a totally different perspective on how freedom can also be applied, not only just to the world of politics, but our daily lives as well.  Humans are designed to adapt to their environment. Wallace colorfully puts it, people are working hard and living a ROUTINE life. Wallace's audience of college students is noted in his work by demonstrating what a normal day would be like after they graduate. He wanted people to be free from the daily tasks and how to think and view others. That there is more to what we actually see on the surface. Wallace pointed out that humans have a default hard-wired setting  An example that the author uses is worship, not just in the religious sense, but in the likes of money,  relationships and some, of Oneself! He uses this to point out how our mentality works and tends to get bounded to something that we have always had or sorrounded by it but not necessarily visible to us. This also goes back to his metaphor about the fish not knowing what or where the water is. This modern kind of freedom is more abstract and mind-boggling than the conventional one.







Comments

  1. Matthew ChenSeptember 15, 2019 at 7:26 AM

    I liked the way you categorized freedom into old and new freedom and did a compare and contrast between the two. You also incorporated the speeches and essays we discussed in class and used it as evidence to prove your points. Good job Lance.

    ReplyDelete
  2. LanceSeptember 15, 2019 at 3:13 PM

    Yes Mathew, though coming from 2 different directions, old and new, with the latter being freedom from self centeredness, collectively, will move all of us further. After all, we have come a long way, Obama being the first African American president in US history.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You know what really grinds my Gears? Pt2

 Ok for most of y’all reading this, this doesn’t apply to you. However it will. Filing income taxes is a pain to do. Sometimes corporations will file them for you if you get lucky. But a majority of Americans have to file it themselves. First you print off the 1040 and grab the numbers from your W-2 and do the rest from there. However if you want to get a tax refund you have to report expenses relating to healthcare or tax deductible donations and a bunch of other things. After finishing the taxes your brain would probably be fried because of how complicated it is. The math isn’t though, but putting the right value on the right lines is straight up cancer. It’s like the IRS exists just to make taxes more complicated. Oh yeah and if you mess up you could get an audit, fined, even worse jail time. The real is reason is why? Well it’s all about money. Most countries have a system called “Return Free Filing” in which the government sends you the tax bill and you check it to see if it was d
Read more

Milkman's thoughts

Inside Milkman’s Thoughts Note: Temporarily moving away from modernism and looking through a different lens.  I was one of high class and with extensive wealth. When I saw the seven days, I took no pity on them, but rather judged them based on their attitudes and on how they took on others and blame but themselves for their disadvantages. I saw them as losers, failures and scum, going around harming others, mainly due to themselves being hurt by the same society. They have a mentality of entitlement, that this society owes them, due to what they’ve been through.   Guitar is a man who never made his dream of playing a guitar.   Porter, is the town drunk (pretty self-explanatory). With nowhere else to go, no one to call friends, made a group to mainly rebel against the dominating force, the white people. I had plenty to do and people to enjoy. I really didn’t care about the whites injustice towards members of my own community. I viewed Guitar as a radicali
Read more

Ways to Remember

Image
How History and People are Remembered There are countless means that people can keep the memory of others alive.  It is usually through tangible ways like writing, photographs, songs, plaques, building and more. Key events in history are relived in many books, movies and memorials.  We don't really pay attention or concern on how people are remembered, even when we come across an article, see or hear about a notable person from the past.  In class, I realized that besides memorials,  there are numerous ways to remember what is significant. As the world changed and evolved, so has how we remember the past. With modern technology, artists, architects, and writers have developed more abstract and more open ended avenues in doing so through tv, movie, and social media. Books  In class we learned about how the book The Things They Carried reflects the experience that the soldiers in the Vietnam war faced. The odd nonlinear structure of the book manifests the issues and the
Read more