The greatest trick the devil ever pulled off was convincing the world that the United States has ever been the land of the free. Unless by free you mean only certain priveleged groups deserve and can expect to have justice, agency, opportunity, and the protection of the law.
It wasn't free if you were indigenous or an indentured servant or Catholic or an enslaved African or a woman. If you were in the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts your only freedom was to follow the Puritan Elders extreme version of Calvinism.
After that it wasn't free if you were a loyalist or laborer or tenant farmer or craftsman. It wasn't free if you were French or Spanish. It wasn't free if you were indigenous even if you were the Cherokee and far more 'civilized' than the white trash around you. It wasn't free if you were Mexican and living in the parts of Mexico that the United States decided to take.
The southern states were so determined to prevent the country from having freedom as a core value that they started a war over it. The hypocrisy of calling it a war over 'states rights' when the south bullied the government into denying northern states the right to abolish all slavery within their own boundaries.
It wasn't free under Jim Crow and racist terrorism and the KKK and white supremacy and an insistence that the US was a WASP nation. It wasn't free if you were an immigrant (desperately needed to expand and develop the country). It was not free if you were Chinese or Irish or Jewish or Italian. It wasn't free if you were indigenous or a woman or anything but Protestant.
It wasn't free in the early 20th century if you were black or biracial or Latino or a poor white. It wasn't free if you were gay. It wasn't free if you were a child working in the mines and mills and factories. It wasn't free if you were indigenous or a woman. It wasn't free if you were black and joined the military to serve your nation in either World War. You weren't allowed to fight, were given no respect, and returned home to the exact same racism.
It has never been free or fair for minorities. It has never truly renounced slavery and genocide and refuses the very notion of reparations. There is always a new group to target. A new scapegoat to distract from the iniquities enshrined within the system. The largest prison population in the world is here. For profit prisons are here. Racial profiling is here. You have no right to food, shelter, education, healthcare. You have the right to wage slavery and a lifetime of debt.
Women do not have bodily autonomy. People do not have the right to self-identify. If your notion of freedom includes conformity, compliance, submission, and acceptance of mandatory patriotism and a morality dictated by a minority? Than yes. The United States is very free.
Freedom here means the acceptance and celebration of greed. It means being allowed the illusion that, if things are alright for you, then there are no real problems. Look at our courts. Our legal system. Our broken and boughten political system. This a police state, a rogue nation flouting international law, a country where sedition is patriotism and extrajudicial murders and mass shootings are justified and normalized.
Do you really think these minor little choices we are allowed represent freedom? Stop following the rules. Stop paying your bills. Stop working. See how far your 'freedom' gets you.
