Free?

An e-mail I just received:

Subject: HAVE YOU NOTICED, MR AUSTER?

Have you noticed that one no longer hears, “It’s a free country”?

Bob in Atlanta

Yes, I have noticed it. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years. I first thought about it in relation to Britain. “It’s a free country” also used to be a common saying there. Now no one says it there. And I think the same is true of the United States. It’s not that all our freedoms have been lost, of course not. We are still, relatively speaking, the freest country on earth. But a country in which all kinds of true and vitally important things cannot be discussed, cannot be said, cannot be even quoted, without terrible damage to one’s job, career, life prospects, and place in society, a country in which the president routinely violates the law and Constitution and asserts dictatorial power (e.g., the birth control mandate) without a major pushback by the Congress and the people, can no longer be called a free country.

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Ken Hechtman writes from Quebec:

I use the phrase all the time. Google counts three times I’ve used it on VFR in the last three years.

But you have a point. The younger the person I’m talking to and the more involved he is in far-left politics, the more likely I am to get a blank look when I say it. And an even blanker one once he realizes that I’m not being ironic.

Irv P. writes:

Throughout my entire “professional” life, the biggest lament I had when I spoke to anyone privately about the racial issues of the day, particularly as they pertained to education, was “and you’re not even allowed to talk about it”!

We haven’t been free for a long time.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 18, 2012 08:40 AM | Send