Can't lose what you never had

“Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky
Freedom is one word that in this country has been effectively hollowed out, filled with stuffing, embalmed and then put upon a shelf as though it were a trophy. The modern American is bred to be selfishly subservient and myopically materialistic, freedom doesn't factor into it at all. Some people seem to think of freedom as a fad started during the Age of Enlightenment that went out of fashion and was replaced by the monolithic might of the modern State. Perhaps that is exactly how it went down and when freedom wasn't en vogue anymore we simply kept the word because it had a good ring to it and it was already in our national anthem. In the new world we are all too codependent to be literally free, but we have a piece of paper called the Bill of Rights that makes us hypothetically free. To be perfectly honest, I have no fucking clue what the word freedom means to the English speaking world. I'm sure in the olden days freedom meant not having some other ethnic group dominate you and your people. Then in the not so olden days it was a metaphysical concept that said you were only free if you live in a representative democracy in which you possess certain inalienable rights. But today it seems to have assumed the characteristics of a mantra with a mystical meaning that questioning is treacherous. I tend to agree with the statement that freedom, if it isn't universal, is just privilege extended. Deep down on some subconscious plain I suspect this is what they all mean by freedom. We dominate other regions and are given certain privileges in return for our support of said domination. This would be supported by the fact that our global campaign to root out opposition and test loyalties is called Operation Enduring Freedom. I'm probably wasting my time trying to make any sense of the average Americans mindset. In my personal opinion freedom is a fundamentally spiritual thing that allows people to no longer be tethered by fear and necessity to what we know in our hearts to be wrong. A nation cannot be free just because they say they are, and that is essentially what we are doing.