Free World

This picture is here just in case you don't
want to deal with my crazed rant.
At least you got to see a koala, right?
Clicking that link was worth it after all...

So we call ourselves the free world. We say that we are at the height of civilization, that we are the most advanced, the most successful, the most cultured. We are the emissaries of freedom. But who is really free, and what is freedom?

Is the man free whose country lives in debt to another? Are citizens free who are shackled by addictions and apathy--who can't go a day without coffee and caffeine, who can't go more than a few hours it seems without the Internet or their favorite TV shows? "They can, they can." I know. But they don't... Is a nation free whose poor starve and whose population is bound to the concrete mausoleums we call metropoli? Is the nation free when money takes precedence over moral, when who you know is more important than who you are? Are people really free when blinded by bias, when a person's skin color or religion is a justification for hatred, and can a people ever be free when they work so tirelessly to renounce the freedoms that their fathers purchased so long ago?  Are we truly free when money and social status are the currency of dreams rather than ingenuity and determination? Where is our liberty when shackled by the mind-forged manacles that we call beauty or the bonds that we call social refinement? How can a country be free when its rulers--its representatives--are slaves to corporations and conglomerates, when a man's conscience must take second stage to his political mobility and his approval rating? How can we trumpet democracy when the government has forgotten the people--when Ploutos and Oligos have crushed Demos beneath their heels?

I guess the problem that I have with writing stuff like this is that I still don't have any answers. All I have is my discontent--the feeling that things aren't as they should be, that maybe things aren't as they seem. I write, perhaps, only to stay afloat in the darkling sea that is this unintelligible world. In the end, though, maybe it doesn't really matter. People can pretty much do what they want. It's a free world, after all...