Justice for the rich

You’re not free in the United States. Don’t get me wrong, though. You have more freedom than elsewhere. As a U.S. citizen, you’re most likely not going to have an agent of the federal government following you across multiple nations with a radioactive weapon to kill you, but that doesn’t automatically mean you should be celebrating. And of course that only holds true if you’re a U.S. citizen. As the last eight years have repeatedly proven, non-citizens may not have the same guarantee.

I’d say you’re going to have a little more freedom if you’re white and at least middle class. But if you’re black or Hispanic in the United States, you are perhaps already a suspect. As the situation with Joe Arpaio demonstrates, the government may have the right to detain or question you simply because your last name is Gomez.

And when I say you’re not free, I don’t mean because you have to pay taxes. Freedom can mean many things, and there’s not space here to delve into semantics.

I speak of freedom as the ability to do what you want. Freedom for me involves exercising individual civil liberties to their full extent. It has to do with the right to be who you are without the government interfering with your business. If freedom means nothing more than economic freedom to you, then Augusto Pinochet’s Chile may look great. But ask that same question to a human rights activists and you may get a different answer.

One of the easiest examples is seat belt laws. We’ll fight tooth and nail to avoid paying taxes for the General Welfare of the union, or to continue texting in cars, yet say nothing about seat belt laws. As for  keeping you from becoming a human projectile or a ward of the state because of an accident, wearing a seat belt or not wearing a seat belt has no impact on anything besides your body. Seat belt laws merely give the government more leeway to pull you over.

In the recent news, people have come out in droves to oppose the ideas of a single payer and the public option in health care, yet they say nothing about the many more heinous actions the government already undertakes.

If you don’t think the state has control over the individual, go visit Amandou Diallo’s grave. On occasion, police storm a bank because of a false alarm and have an 81-year-old banker face down and handcuffed with their guns drawn, and no one blinks an eye.  Everyone is a potential suspect. It only takes one mistaken identity or mistyped name to become an enemy of the state.

Still think that you are free?


E-mail: mrstraw@indiana.edu