“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes”

Blog #5
December 7, 2010

“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.” -Gandhi

After living in a foreign country for awhile, you begin to gain perspective about the United States. You realize negative things like our corrupt healthcare system run by profit and greed, rather than prevention and wellness. You realize positive things such as how stable our government really is compared to the rest of the world. Even with all the political media chaos, and when it seems like the far right and the extreme left are going to implode, the reality is; most of us go about our daily lives unfazed.

What is the key factor, the thing that others lack, that allows this “organized” chaos to function? How can a country with so many varying views be a world leader, a financial power, and the model that so many have strived to attain in history.

The answer, as obvious and cliché as it may be, only became evident to me (in practice vs. theory) as I’ve been living abroad. Freedom. The power to exercise rights and make decisions without constraint (within the law). Better expressed perhaps as self-determination or free will.

I chose to quote Gandhi as my title because he understood that freedom comes with a price. True freedom means the liberty to do right and the liberty to do wrong.

I bring this up because of a thought provoking political-economics lecture I was subjected to this week. Since the U.S. has a very high income gap (between the richest and the poorest) than most other developed countries, my professor decided to do comparisons to other statistics where income was the x constant axis, and y would be variables such as quality of healthcare, drug/alcohol abuse, infant mortality, literacy, obesity, etc. Countries would then be ranked based on these figures plotting points along the graph. In 99% of the cases, the U.S. was ranked highest (in a bad way). Polar opposite was usually Japan. The E.U. countries were mainly chunked together in the middle.

I must admit, seeing graph after graph, I became angry. I don’t consider myself an ethnocentric or greatly patriotic person, but I was upset. Why be upset over graphs you might ask? (Besides the dumb giggling of the other Europeans, many of which have never even been to the U.S.) I was upset because the data does not take freedom into account.

Sure it’s easy to have good rankings when your government is practically socialist and calling all the shots for you. Or sure it’s easy when one man’s perception of ‘good policy’ is forced on you. Try a taste of our freedom, and let me know how it goes.

Winston Churchill once said: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing- after they’ve tried everything else.” The point being….it’s always our choice. Do I like the negative aspects of American society, no; but it is crucial to understand that “wrongs” exist so that a thousand more “rights” can. In other words, the shadow proves the sunshine.

There’s a lot more I can go into here, but in the end I guess I’m trying to say that I appreciate the choices I have. Even if that freedom hurts me in the end, it is my very own. Protected by some idiots in Washington, a president, and most importantly the Constitution; which is a series of ideas, and ideas are bulletproof.

Jackie <3