Give me liberty, or give me America!

A few thoughts on why America is not as free as it's cracked up to be

In my younger and more vulnerable years… my friend and I were surveying the streets of Midtown Manhattan on July 4th, drinking the vodka of the impecunious when a libations inspector sidled alongside in his blue and white cruiser, leaned out the window and made unpleasant allegations to as the lawfulness of our activities. Well, it turns out that celebrating freedom from tyranny, liberty from persecution and the independence of one’s country from an overbearing monarch can be memorialized in many fashions, but not with a stiff drink in public you maniac! I got a ticket and the sidewalk got a dousing of fourth-rate vodka that the officer compelled me to jettison.

A few years later I would disembark from a grocery store in the outskirts of Moscow at two in the afternoon. Parked front and center was a police car the size of a Mini Cooper, its non-ample interior caressing two corpulent cops self-medicating with a bottle of vodka.

“What a country…” I muttered to nobody in particular.

The country in which I’m currently residing has strict slander laws. Ostensibly these regulations protect individuals and businesses from unfair criticisms. However, practice often makes a mockery of theory. For example, say that a construction company botches a client’s home so that their brand-new roof leaks, the floor is uneven and half the tiles in the bathroom are smeared with paint*. If the client goes online and levies criticisms that are verifiably true, he or she may be taken to court by the contractor and there’s a good chance that the slime sucker will win.

*This is essentially the norm around here, not the exception.

Or here’s an example of something that actually happened. During Covid a popular rock star criticized the health system and the doctors’ treatment techniques. The rocker’s reward? He was jailed for a year…

I held my tongue (online) during Covid because I was afraid to post anything that might get me deported. Also, while I personally have no love for marijuana plenty of people do and whenever someone visits me I warn them that if they’re anywhere that weed is being smoked they should leave. Immediately. You can get locked up for a year for having a single joint or vape pen, and God forbid you get caught with more than that. Let’s just say, I hope you like Asian prison food.

Now that you have some background on where I live, let me ask you a question. Am I living in a free country?

Seriously though, take a moment. I’ll wait.

OK.

So you probably wouldn’t rank this place’s freedomability very high, right?

Well, how about this. Should the urge strike I could drive a motorcycle through the city in my boxers while drinking a bottle of beer white knuckled in my non-throttle hand, recklessly rocketing through every tyrannical red light of oppression in my war path while belting out Eminem lyrics with a cigarette clutched between my ash-smeared lips. I could do this until I ran out of gas, beer or consciousness and there’s almost zero chance I would ever be held to account. This being especially the case if I took off my license plates and replaced them with a set of the fake plates that you can buy at any number of small mechanic’s shops that dot the back alleys.

If I had a four-year-old kid, I could do the same thing with my un-helmeted mini Capitalist on the back of my bike and there’s still only the thinnest sliver of an opportunity that I would be stopped.

There are no lifeguards or stupid rules at the beach here. If I want to throw sand or drown it’s well within my rights to do so. I can park anywhere and never get a ticket, drive on the sidewalk, smoke in a restaurant, blow out my stereo at 3 am, let my dog off the leash anywhere, start a fire by the side of the road to cook hot dogs on or do almost anything conceivable so long as it doesn’t harm another person or their property.

Try doing any of that in America (outside of San Francisco, anyways…) and see how far it gets you.

Freedom is not binary. Although freedom of speech is increasingly under scrutiny in America, the USA nonetheless remains a bastion of free expression where each citizen can say whatever he or she pleases without fearing for their arrest. Yet despite the freedom of speech I often find America to be one of the most stifling countries I’ve ever been to. There’s a Biblical plague of rules and regulations, constantly enforced by a small army of ticket-happy apparatchiks who can’t sleep at night unless they’ve sufficiently mulcted the masses.

• The last time I was in NYC I was driving my friend’s car with some trepidation because I didn’t know where the speed cameras were. Accidentally go 3 MPH over the limit at just the wrong time and you’ll experience the divine comedy of a $100 ticket.

• A few days later I was smoking a cigar on the boardwalk by the beach, but I wasn’t fully enjoying my cancer stick because apparently you’re not allowed to light up and I couldn’t tell whether that’s a real ban or a rule that people ignore. So instead of reveling in the moment, which is what one is supposed to do with a cigar, I felt anxious as I wondered whether some cop was about to bust me.

• A while back I was in Denver and my sister made me redo my parking job because I was two inches too far from the curb and you can get a ticket for that. I complained bitterly about the injustice of it all, got back in and wasted two precious minutes of my life re-parking.

• At one point I had a motorcycle with an inspection sticker seven years out of date* and I drove it past three cops in fifteen seconds and nearly had a heart attack.
  *My current motorcycle’s inspection sticker is a mere three years out of date.

Lead us not to exaggeration, for therein lies the cheap thrills of pulp fiction and tabloid tattles. America’s love for the rules and embracing of the ticket is not an oppressive cloud of horror that keeps one awake at night. However, it’s not nothing either. More than occasionally I feel a heaviness in America that I don’t feel in other countries. The experience is similar to the little hit of anxiety that comes from knowing that there is something you should be doing but you’re not sure what. And to be honest, it’s kind of lame and I wish the USA could lighten the hell up.

It’s all bad?

How can you poke a hole in my articulations? Well, America is a massive and diverse country. My perceptions are shaped by where I live. Although I was born in the West and have spent a great deal of time near the mountains, my family now lives in the North East. This is the rule-happy section of the country that I find myself in, and no doubt people living in rural Montana, Texas or South Dakota can get away with a lot more.

Also, having a few rules isn’t necessarily a tragedy. I think that most of us would agree that it’s a good thing that America enforces the norm that you can’t blast a stereo at 3 am, or drunkenly drive a motorcycle with a four-year-old on back.

Finally, I’m sure that a sizeable chunk of humanity would prefer to live in a place with more rules than less, and that’s fine. To each their own. All I’m trying to do is point out that America does not have a monopoly on liberty, and freedom can exist in a multitude of ways.

I’ve found that it can be beautiful to experience other cultures that might not have the same rights of the written word, but which nonetheless allow their citizens a great deal of latitude in how they conduct their day-to-day affairs. Because let’s be real, if you’ve never driven a motorcycle down the sidewalk in your flip flops, or taken a crotch rocket at 70 MPH through a 4 foot gap between a pair of dump trucks, have you even lived?