Complete freedom is a dream that few people ever really achieve

"A republic ... if you can keep it."
-- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 1787

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose ..."
-- KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, c. 1970

Exactly what is this thing we call freedom?

There are a lot of things it isn't. It isn't the ability to have everything in the world the way you want it, and it isn't the right to own everything you want when you want it.

It certainly isn't only about the relationship between you and the government. There are other relationships in your life which are a lot more intrusive.


It was much less aggravating for me to live under eight years of Ronald Reagan and eight years of George W. Bush than it was to spend the last nine years of my career working for Dean Singleton's Media News Group. Yet most people are far more likely to blame the government for their woes than their employer, even though increases in employee productivity have far outstripped wage increases.

It isn't just money either. When I was younger, if someone wanted a part-time job while attending college, they could negotiate with an employer to fit their two schedules together. But if you try now to do something like that with a company like Walmart -- America's largest employer -- you'll be told that you have to be available to work when they need you.

Walmart isn't the only culprit. Far too many employers expect even part-timers to be on call 24/7 as if they were police officers or firefighters.

Time isn't all they ask of you. Many menial jobs require drug testing before you are actually hired, and some even require polygraph tests. I was fortunate, I suppose. I worked until I was 58 years old and was never drug-tested or polygraphed.

I worked as a journalist for more than 28 years, and I worked for people who were brilliant and people who were idiots. For the most part, the best bosses I ever had were those who hired the right people, made sure they understood what was expected of them and then got out of their way.

The best boss I ever had was Ron Stewart, the editor of the Greeley Tribune who hired me to be his sports editor in October 1986. I was working at a much larger paper as a sports reporter, but that paper was only a couple of weeks from giving up the ghost.

Ron was happy to get a sports editor for his 25,000 circulation daily who had been working for a major metropolitan paper for the last 2 1/2 years. I was happy to have job security, a higher salary and to move from St. Louis to the Front Range of Colorado.

I worked for him for nearly two years. He treated me like an adult, and perhaps even more important, he treated me like a professional who knew what he was doing.

I did things the way I wanted for two years and was never slapped down or told I was wrong. The result was that in 1988, our paper -- both daily and Sunday -- was chosen as one of the top 20 sports sections among papers with less than 50,000 circulation.

I never had a situation like that again, although 1996-97, the beginning of my tenure as a columnist in California, came close. Steve Trosley, the editor who made me a columnist, let me write about whatever I wanted. If he had stayed in Ontario, things might have been very different. He didn't, though, and I never had a good boss again.

In fact, most of the choices we make in our lives end up restricting our freedom in one way or another. When we borrow money, whether as a mortgage, a car loan, a student loan or many other types of debt -- we are less free until we repay it.

When we take on personal relationships, when we make commitments to other people, we reduce our freedom in exchange for other benefits. From 1980 until 1992, when I was between marriages, I could pretty well do whatever I wanted without needing to ask anyone else. When I had a day off from work, I could go to the mall and see two or three movies at the multiplex if I so desired.

Or I could come home from work at midnight, put on the television and watch movies on cable till three or four in the morning. It was freedom, but there were times it was fairly lonely.

Freedom is important, although too many people focus on stupid stuff and call it freedom. Things like not wearing a seat belt in a car, or not wearing a helmet while riding on a motorcycle.

But there are freedoms that matter a lot, and some of them are greatly misunderstood. Take freedom of speech, for example. Whenever someone loses a job for saying something bigoted, someone will ask, "What about their freedom of speech?"

Well, they said what they wanted to say. That didn't mean there wouldn't be any consequences.

Or freedom of the press, which basically means freedom for the man or woman who owns the press.

If you have freedom of religion, you have freedom for almost anything that calls itself a religion. Any privilege given to Christians or Jews also has to go also to Scientologists or even Satanists.

One of the biggest problems we have these days is that too many people on both sides are basically ignorant. When Franklin made his famous comment after the Constitutional Convention, he was referring to the need for an educated public to maintain a republic.

I doubt Franklin could even have imagined a nation in which one of every five adults was functionally illiterate. Or a country in which 65-70 percent of adults never read books. Look at how many newspapers and magazines that once mattered a great deal no longer exist. People get their news, such as it is, from radio, television and the Internet function on their cellphones.

And of course, radio and television "news" is hardly about impartial, unbiased news anymore. People may have thought Walter Cronkite was liberal, but you would never know it when he was presenting the news. It was pretty much the same for most of the news anchors. There were people on staff as commentators, and you knew where they stood, but the networks did a good job of keeping news and opinion in separate boxes.

Ever since Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign, Republicans have been getting working-class voters to go against their own interests by keeping them misinformed and resentful and mixing in a large seasoning of American exceptionalism.

Yes, they are free to vote however they want, but anyone convinced to vote against their own interests for reasons that don't even exist is just reducing their own level of freedom.

The only people who are truly free are people who have nothing to lose. If you have something to lose, you can get blindsided by things beyond your control. I would never have chosen to work for Media News Group, but when Singleton bought the paper where I worked, all of a sudden I was his employee.

So for nine years, I worked and worried and was anything but free. It was a great disappointment to be sacked in 2008 -- if only I'd had a better offensive line -- but I was near enough to retiring that I just never worked again.

That still doesn't make me free. Even though my wife and I are essentially retired and we own our house free and clear, we still have enough obligations that if our savings and Social Security disappeared, we wouldn't be able to keep up.

Chez Unabomber

We'll always need food and we'll always need medical care. We have to pay our utilities, the HOA fees for our gated community and our yearly property tax. We're doing well, but we have plenty to lose and that keeps us from being truly free.

You want to know who was free? The damn Unabomber, at least until he got caught. Ted Kaczynski was living completely off the grid in a ramshackle cabin, but until he started killing people, he was free.

That's why for most people, true freedom is just a pipe dream.

All they can really do is complain about the government and whine about their bosses.

It's the equivalent of shouting, "You damn kids get off my lawn!"