Stop Using the Freedom Buzzword
It’s an election year, so it’s already super annoying every time you turn on the television, Facebook, the radio, whatever. (Seriously, I think we should all just mass boycott the media until late November.) What makes it even more annoying—aside from the attack ads and the dismal bunch of clowns who are vying for the position of one of the biggest leaders in the world and the general nastiness among coworkers and brother-in-laws—is this “freedom” buzzword being thrown in every direction.
Look, I know it’s not the first time that the word has been used to sell something. Hell, less than a decade ago Bush II was using it left and right to tell us what was being threatened here—not the freedoms that he curtailed via wiretapping, the PATRIOT Act, the revoking of our previous Bill of Rights, and so forth, of course, but this glorious Day-GLO American DREAM that somehow never was really fully put into words or defined; it just sounded super duper scary to say “THE TERRORISTS HATE OUR FREEDOM!” as if it made any sense. It sure made plenty of people crush their Dixie Chicks albums, anyway.
Today the words are being used most often around candidates like Mitt Romney and Ron Paul and Rick Santorum. Their supporters realize that none of these men think it’s okay to give women their own autonomous freedom regarding, say, their own BODIES, and that they also do not support providing gay Americans with the right to marry whomever they love—but they sure support freedom! That is, of course, the freedom to make as much money as they want off of us, to let their corporate sponsors run as much of the nation as possible, to not pay their own taxes, and to control women and gays.
Did you miss that part? Yes, that’s what the new definition of freedom means—these rich piranhas took it back. You know, like how people are taking back the words “retarded” and “gay” to mean “stupid.” So “freedom” now means “ability to control women and gays—and pretty much everyone who isn’t a richwhiteman, yay!”
Except, wait, that’s not true; the word means the same thing it did ten years ago, or it did when I just looked it up. So maybe it’s the supporters of these men who need to invest in a dictionary when they start throwing that word around instead.