Life, LIBERTY, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Freedom.  It’s what the second word in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” means.  It’s supposed to be what America stands for, but is it?

I was mocked the other day for holding a certain opinion, not just because I had the opinion, but specifically because my opinion was that the option was what did not impede the freedom of Americans.  It was the freedom part that was mocked.  At first, all I could think was ”Was my nap today really decades instead of minutes, is freedom no longer important in America?” but then I came to realize that we have been slowly losing that concept for a while.

Bring up about any controversial topic, and what you will here is people talking about if it should be legal or not, how the government should deal with it.  We’ve become a country that no longer cares about the freedom for everyone to make their own choices, we want the only choices to be the ones we agree with, and we want the government to tell them so.  Every time we do this, that word liberty loses more of its meaning, and it affects the life and pursuit of happiness of millions of people in this country.

Many people can’t even fathom anymore that just because something is legal doesn’t mean it is right, or because it is illegal that it is wrong.  It’s the law, so “fact.”  We let the government tell us what we should think.

Drinking soda is not the healthiest choice we can make, but we’ve gotten to the point that instead of letting people make decisions about how much they want to consume, we allow laws to be made to regulate what size cups can be sold at convenience stores in various places. 

Making laws that take away freedom of choice does nothing to change people’s minds about what is right to do, what is good for them, or is even going to change their behavior.  The soda drinker who can’t buy a 20 oz cup can still buy two 10 oz cups.  Sometimes taking away that choice can be harmful to some, such as when we make marijuana illegal so that we can pretend that people then can’t use it recreationally, and in the process keep a useful medication from people such as cancer patients.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with having opinions on matters, feeling that something is right or wrong, is good for you.  As long as something does not infringe upon the rights of another or causes another harm, it shouldn’t be something that gets legislated, something that the government decides. Influence people with mature, reasonable discussions of matters (though the erosion of that ability could be a whole other blog post), that is how beliefs and behaviors will change.

Many times, trying to specify legalities to issues takes away our ability to use common sense.  The whole which-bathroom-does-a-transgender-person-use comes to mind.  We never really had a big problem with this, didn’t even notice who was in the bathroom with us, until we tried to decide this as a black and white matter.  It’s not black and white, it’s a great big, giant gray, a gray that can only be navigated with common sense on an individual basis.

I personally believe abortion outside of medical necessity is wrong, I feel that infringes on the rights of life of the child.  However, my goal is not to make it illegal, and it is also not a black and white matter.  My goal is to try to show people options and find ways to facilitate those options, to highlight the value of life, and to express my opinion on the correlation between the acceptance of abortion and the decline of the respect for life, in the hopes that maybe I can convince just one person to make a different decision.  Looking for the easy way of having the government say “No” isn’t going to change anyone’s mind, it’s just a way to hand over the responsibility of speaking what I feel to someone else.

Gay marriage, marijuana use, sodas, birth control, breast feeding, motorcycle helmets, and on and on and on are things that affect only the people who make those choices or not, let people make their choices instead of the government.

Freedom.  I hope that maybe I influenced at least one person to find that important again.

That’s why they have wine.