Politics: Freedom and Rights (July 4th Musings)

So I'm a bit late for Independence Day reflections, but hey -- only by five days. Rather than waiting until next year, I wanted to share a few notions that have been chasing each other around in my head recently, making my brainbox clatter, before they dissipate forever.

On my recent trip to Jamaica, I was struck, as I often am when traveling in the "developing world," at how free the people there are. Now I realize it is heretical and blasphemous to put forth the idea that people in another country enjoy greater freedoms than we do in the U.S., but it's pretty hard to argue that they don't: just witness people zipping around on motorcycles with no helmets, racing around in cars with no seatbelts, carrying their babies on their laps instead of strapping them into carseats -- and that's just the automotive stuff. How about walking down the street with a marijuana joint in one hand and a Red Stripe in the other? (Yes, marijuana is illegal, but nobody's going to bother you about it out in the bush) How about not having to work for the government for the first three months of every year?

Now, do I want to do all of those things, or do I think that they're good ideas? No, all except for shrugging off some of the tax burden. But it would be nice to make those decisions myself, and it's pretty undeniable that the people in Jamaica (and a lot of other places) live much more freely than we do, at least if your definition of freedom has to do with being left alone to make your own choices about how you conduct your everyday life. So jingoists who spout the line that the USA is the freest country on the planet either are ignorant of how the world actually functions or they're confusing freedom with rights.

We do have good rights in the US, no doubt about it. But the way I've come to see it, there is a practical tension between rights and freedom. You have to surrender some of your freedom to secure your rights. I'm being a bit abstract here, so let me lay down something concrete by way of illustration.

Several years ago, my brother-in-law moved to Haiti, in large part because of the freedoms he could find there. As you may know, Haiti has almost no functioning government. People are left alone to sort things out. There's not even such a thing as a building permit. You want to build, you put up your structure and get on with life. There's no reliable electrical system, so you wire up something using a generator -- no light bill, no regulation. And if someone steals a dozen eggs, he will be chased down by his neighbors and beaten, perhaps to death, his body left on a garbage heap. Nice, right? Your neighbors will definitely think twice about pilfering eggs from off your porch.

But here's where it gets tricky. What if someone thinks they saw you steal a dozen eggs, but you were actually at home with your children at the time of the theft? It's pretty hard to argue your case against a mob determined to do you harm. In the US, we have the wonderful right of due process, a trial by peers, a chance to defend oneself in open court.

But you can't have the rule of law without sacrificing some of your freedoms. You've got to organize into civil society, abide by more and more rules, pass some laws, get some order going, allow the government into your life and into your wallet. Is it a worthwhile tradeoff? When the gang of neighbors has you cornered up against the garbage heap, you certainly might think so.

But these things are not absolute. The balance between freedom and rights changes constantly with passage of new laws, court precedents, the political mood. At some points in our history, that balance has looked quite different than it does today or will tomorrow. Somewhere in abstraction lies the perfect balance. Compared with a lot of other countries in the world, the US is doing all right in finding that balance. Compared to others, not so great. We have the rule of law, sort of: but the blacker your skin, or the further down the economic ladder you happen to be, the less enforceable some of those rights seem to be. And when it comes to the basic balance between how freely we get to live and how secure our rights are, I think we're losing ground.

This was driven home to me a few days ago when I was out riding my bike. One of my favorite trails is a dirt road sandwiched between the river and the railroad tracks. It goes along like that for miles. I stopped for a drink of water and an older gentleman pedaled up to me and we started talking. Somehow we got onto the subject of the railroad tracks, and he said something about how you didn't ever want to venture onto them because they'd fine you for trespassing if you got caught. I began to bemoan the loss of the old freedom of strolling along the tracks to one's heart's content. "I hate that people aren't allowed to make their own choices about things like that," I said. "The government always seems to be deciding for you what things are safe enough for you to do."

He looked at me kind of funny and said, "The railroad and the government don't care at all about your safety. The railroad just doesn't want to have to defend itself in a lawsuit because your foot got stuck in the track."

True enough, I realized. We in the US have this wonderful right to sue for the redress of grievances and damages. I've spoken to enough people who were woefully maimed by malpracticing doctors to believe very strongly in that right. And yet the ample exercise by enough people of the right to sue has resulted in the curtailing of a personal freedom: the freedom to spend a lazy afternoon seeing where the tracks go.

And it's not just railroad tracks. In my lifetime, I've seen an astonishing number of personal freedoms just disappear from this country, sacrificed to public health and national security with virtually no thought to the reality of the threat. No kids under 12 in the front seat. Why not? Well, because there's a very, very slim chance that you might get into an accident. And if you do get into an accident, there's a slim chance that it might be just such an accident as to cause the airbag to deploy. And if the airbag deploys, there's a slim chance that it might injure your child. Yet we follow these rules, and follow them, and follow them.

There are some pretty obvious reasons why that's a bad thing, but let me suggest one not-so-obvious repercussion of all this: the psychological fallout. Put up enough gates and barriers and warning stickers and ordinances and no-trespassing signs, and pretty soon you have a population that believes their world is absolutely fraught with peril (especially when you throw in some television, including the 6:00 news). Walk along the railroad tracks? Everybody knows that's dangerous; look at all the signs and laws against it!

Americans used to be an intrepid people. We used to go out into the world and do bold things, confident in our self-sufficiency. We're not like that anymore. We're an increasingly timid, law-abiding, stay-at-home people. Who makes it out to Jamaica's Cockpit Country these days? Germans. Dutch. Australians. The Americans are down on the coast, at the Sandals resort, safe within their fortress.

One final note to my rant. I've talked about the natural tension between rights and freedoms, and I've said that in the balance between them, we've been losing ground. The worst eventuality is an erosion of both rights and freedoms simultaneously. And I would contend that we have experienced just that over the past eight years. If you're a conservative and a Clinton-basher, I'm certainly not going to argue that the Clinton years didn't see a diminishment of personal freedoms -- but what do you make of an administration that codifies torture, conducts illegal domestic spying, suspends habeus corpus, and on and on?

This election is about some very basic things. I posted a couple of days ago about some of my reservations concerning Obama. But voters would do well to ask themselves which of the two candidates is more likely to continue the Bush Administration's policies of simultaneously curtailing our rights and our freedoms. The US will not be a very nice place to live when we are overburdened by taxes, penned in by laws that touch every corner of our lives, and denied the human rights which once made the sacrifice of a few freedoms seem worthwhile.