June 19th, still a couple months away, is coming fast. It has been one of my favorite holidays, because it marked the day, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, American slaves learned they were free. However, I have realized that freedom can't be granted by proclamation. All that can be granted are privileges. Free men must make their freedom.
IMG source - Odysee.com/@SkidmarksakaBriekmereke
Guided by this principle I watched this Paean to Freedom today, from a South African, living in a country that has freed itself from Apartheid and should be a shining example of the freedom free men can make. But did South Africa really free itself? In fact, didn't global polities and corporations withdraw their support and assistance to the Apartheid regime and lend it, instead, to the ANC? Freedom has really been foisted upon them, rather than them making it themselves, and it is reflected in their governance today.
We should beware of the proclamations of overlords that declare we are free, because freedom we make ourselves, by becoming independent of overlords by our own efforts, is vastly different than becoming free of the blessings of civilization provided by overlords.
We aren't free until we ourselves are the creators of our civilization, which we freely build ourselves. As long as we depend on overlords, for our necessities as much as our freedom, we aren't free at all, but dependents, that they can control by dangling this or that we need in whatever direction they want us to go. When we are free of such dependence, then we are free in truth.
Freedom to live is not freedom from life.