Forget the myth and let's work for real freedom in America

What does it mean anymore to be free, particularly in terms of Americans and their rights?

If we start with the Declaration of Independence, we believe that some rights are given to us by God and cannot be taken away by government -- life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That sounds wonderful, but we really only pay lip service to those rights being inalienable. There are all sorts of reasons government can restrict our liberties and even take our lives.

If we get down to specifics, our most treasured freedoms are in the Bill of Rights, particularly in the First Amendment -- speech, religion, the press and assembly. But when it comes even to these, we seem to have lost our common sense.

When did out-and-out lying become protected speech under the First Amendment? When did freedom of religion become freedom from ever having to hear about someone else's religion?

When did freedom of the press become the right to inundate the airwaves with trash about celebrities and pointless attacks on opponents?

But let's move on from enumerated rights and look at rights or freedoms we lack compared to much of the rest of the world. In his 1944 State of the Union address, President Roosevelt said that "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence."

He proposed a second Bill of Rights for after the war, and sadly his death meant none of it was ever enacted. Some of these rights were the right to a useful job at a fair salary, the right to a decent home, a good education, health care and care for the elderly.

If there is one great irony in all this, it's that the U.S. is just about the only "free" nation in the world that doesn't provide these guarantees to its citizens. We seem to be just about the only country in the world still living under 17th century Protestantism, convincing ourselves that the hard-working and pious succeed and the lazy and weak fail.

For one thing, that's incredibly judgmental. But far worse is that it dooms children to second- and third-rate lives because they had bad parents.

Sam Walton made billions because he had a good business plan and worked hard. His four children split those billions for no other reason than being members of the Lucky Sperm Club.

There isn't anything we can do about that, but it seems like we could at least do something about the other side of the coin and stop telling kids they've got no real chance to succeed because they had the wrong parents.

For all the talk about America being a land of opportunity, a country where anyone can get rich, the fact is that we have less upward mobility from the middle class to the upper class than most of the nations of Western Europe.

Maybe we ought to stop buying the myth and start working to improve the reality.