What is freedom to you? A writing prop recently popped up in my digital diary.
For somebody who was born and raised in the USSR, whose place of birth is present-day Belarus, infamous for its dictator, my answer to that question is from the place of experience of what freedom is not.
What is freedom to me?
Freedom is choice.
At the ballot box—like 27 candidates in the parliamentary elections, not one and only.
My body—my choice—and I shall bear no interferences.
In who or what I want to believe in or worship. I choose to believe in no deity and worship no one. And I am not sorry.
Freedom is pluralism.
A right to an opinion, however non-conventional, inconvenient or non-mainstream.
On vaccines, on regimes, on wars, on policies, on rights of minorities and loot of majorities.
Pluralism is an expression of your stance and should not be treated as a thought crime from an Orwellian dystopia or become a self-righteous crusade to prove everyone is wrong. We’ve had too many of those in human history: religious, colonial, racial and ideological.
Freedom is a multiverse where a multitude of stories, opinions and angles, including those of our opponents and adversaries, can co-exist. Censoring people out of discourse is not freedom.
Freedom is the right to evolution—individual and societal.
Redemption without cancellation. Freedom is the right to change. Isn’t it how we, as a collective society, advanced from the Dark Ages?
Sure, our ancestors screwed up big time. Acknowledge the evils, reflect and put the lessons into perspective. One cannot wipe slates of history clean by cancelling them.
We, as beings, evolve throughout our lives. Our opinions and positions change as we learn through exchanges and interactions, come across new information and discoveries and experience life. What I thought was right 35 years ago isn’t what I deem right today. Back in the day, subsisting on an ideological diet, I was a fierce proponent of socialism. America and the entire Western world were my enemies. The pain of disillusionment and deceit is still acute. Should I be cancelled for the views I once held?
What is freedom to you?
The crux of this question is in to you? I’ve answered. You don’t have to agree with any of it. And that to me, is freedom.