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This week: Independence Day Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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The secret to happiness is freedom... And the secret to freedom is courage.
-Thucydides
I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.
Charles Dickens
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
Abraham Lincoln |
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As this newsletter is scheduled to appear on July 4, Independence Day here in the US, I thought I'd say a few things about freedom.
You know that there are concrete nouns and abstract nouns. Concrete nouns describe things that we can generally agree on: sky, chair, cat, finger. Abstract nouns are a bit more difficult. They describe ideas, not physical things. Some examples are love, beauty, justice... and freedom.
Chairs can take on many forms, from the hard-seated dining table chair to an ornate throne to a comfortable easy chair. But regardless of style, most of the time, when two different people look at an object with four legs, a seat and a back, they'll both call it a chair.
This is not always the case with abstract nouns. Two people can look at a picture of a movie star and, while one of them might see "beauty," the other might not.
Entire books have been written about this sort of thing. One might even say that this is a major purpose of literature - to communicate the abstract in concrete ways. You can try to define "honor," for example, all day, but in the end, the only way to truly communicate your point of view on it is to give examples - to tell, in effect, a story.
Here, on the Fourth of July, we tell each other stories of freedom - in one way or another. It's not just about independence, though that's the actual name of the day - that's easier; it commemorates the independence of the American colonies from British rule (a process that, I should note for clarity, took substantially more than one day, but you have to start somewhere).
But then it gets a little murkier - more abstract. Many colonists left Britain, and other countries, to flee religious discrimination... only to impose it here. A major part of the economy depended on slavery, and would do so for another 90 years or so, and slavery is the polar opposite of freedom, by almost any definition. The former colonists proceeded to drive indigenous populations from their ancestral homes, which also doesn't say "freedom" to me.
So what, exactly, did they mean by "freedom?" Freedom from foreign rule - okay, but we ended up with a country where the seat of government is further, geographically, from some places within the country than this same capital was from London at its founding. So what's "foreign," then?
The idea that we choose our own government, now, that's a big one, but again, who's "we?" At the time, women could not vote, so that leaves out at least half of the actual population right there.
The more you think about what freedom actually means, especially in the context of a country such as the US, the more slippery the definition becomes. Is it about individual freedom? Or freedom of certain groups, such as a family or a congregation? Given the pushback against things such as who can marry whom - and I'm not just talking about gay marriage; the laws against interracial marriage were only struck down 50 or so years ago - when it comes to freedom, our definitions are clearly at odds.
As writers, perhaps the most important freedom we have is enshrined in the First Amendment, in the bit about freedom of speech. There, it guarantees that the government can't imprison you for expressing ideas. And yet, we had things like the Red Scare of the 1950s, the McCarthy Era, where writers, and others, were blacklisted for daring to express ideas different from those approved by the government. So, clearly, even that freedom has its limitations.
And can anything with limitations truly be called "freedom?"
I don't have answers. Clearly, freedom does, and must, have limitations - I think most of us can agree that freedom ends when it starts to intrude on the freedom of others, but even that is mostly a gray area, as we saw recently with the wedding cake thing.
But I would urge you - whether you're a US resident or not - to consider this abstract concept both when you write, and in your daily life. Are you promoting freedom? Or are you promoting some form of obedience? Or something in between? Is it for the greater good, or from selfish motivations (for you, your characters, or the people around you)?
As I said, it's a difficult thing to define, and even to grasp. But maybe the effort, in this case, is worth it. |
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Last time, in "Originality is Overrated" , I talked about the perils of originality.
BIG BAD WOLF is Howling  : Just read a book called Villains By Necessity by Eve Forward. Basically, it is after the victory of Good over Evil, and Good has spread throughout the land. Problem is, there's too much Good, and now it's up to a group of Villains to save the world, by unleashing Evil back into it.
Yes, the old canard of "balancing" good and evil. It's nonsense. (Though the book may be good; I don't know, because I haven't read it.) It works in D&D because the game is set up that way. In real life, not so much - there's plenty of bad stuff that can happen without human agency (volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, etc.) and even if every human being in the world acted on the side of "good," there would be plenty of opportunity for heroism.
And that's it for me for now - see you next time! Until then,
DREAM ON!!!
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Fantasy: July 04, 2018 Issue [#8984]
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