Only because no one ever reads this column have the editors (the people who really run things around here) given me permission to blurt out a secret—

This issue of WritersMonthly.com has a theme: freedom.

I don’t know about you, but being free scares me. It always has.

In fact, the only thing that scares me more than being free— is losing my freedom.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that the fear of freedom, and the fear of the loss of freedom, has messed with people’s minds throughout history.

So many individuals—real and imagined— have endured this exquisite tension, and snapped.

People like that Danish dude, Hamlet. If Hamlet wasn't the essence of a person wrestling with the ultimate freedom— to be or not to be—and wrestling with some other tough choices—to snuff the evil step-dad or to accept the expenses-paid voyage to England, party down, and just forget about the rotten politics back home—then I don't know freedom from a chimichanga.

The quality and degree of every individual’s freedom is in constant flux, influenced by factors from their own mental and physical state, to the politics of the person standing next to them on the subway. But ideally, when people are free to cope with or to be done in by the infinite aloneness of their existence, free from the life and death urgency of dodging sniper's bullets or scanning crowds for self-annihilating, murderous bombers who want so badly to disintegrate them— then every moment of their lives people are faced with an infinite number of choices.

People left alone will make choices that can lead to the creation of magnificent wonders—or concentration camps.

I enjoy a high level of freedom. My days and nights are not spent dodging bullets, hijacked jets or anthrax-laden letters. I have more than enough to eat, good shelter, a bicycle and a CD of Louis Prima’s greatest hits.

Right now I am sipping a decent California merlot created from grapes cultivated over many decades by free people left alone to do what they wanted. I am composing this rambling essay on a Macintosh computer, another creation of free people left alone to do what they wanted. My dog just bunked his head into my thigh, which is his way of reminding me that 8 years ago when I was left alone to do what I wanted, I chose to take on the responsibility of being his guardian, and that choice includes periodically scratching behind his ears, and the explicit treaty that only after a nearly unimaginably cataclysmic change in both our life-styles would either of us even think of trying to eat the other.

Life is good. Yet, maybe it could be better. Even as I enjoy all the above-mentioned fruits of my freedom, I could also decide to begin to train to become an astronaut. No. Really. What's the name of the Russian space agency? Wonder if they have a website...

Or I could decide to telephone an old friend and have an argument. I could start smoking. Then I could quit. Then I could start again. I could take one of the thin, plastic, magnetized rectangles out of my wallet, run downtown, and spend thousands of dollars of other free people’s money—with no more collateral than my promise to pay them back, with interest.

This is nothing new. Primitive people, i.e., people living before 1940, had to make choices, too. The only difference between now and then is that we have more choices. Choices always come in two flavors: light, and dark. As examples: Once upon a time, all major league baseball pitchers had no choice but to go to bat for themselves. Once upon a time, people could not choose to destroy this planet. This accumulation of more and more choices is called progress.

I could be wrong, but I suspect what separates Man from Beast is that Beast does not know when he is free—he only knows when he is not. Man is acutely aware of his freedom, and his lack of freedom. Oddly, either one can drive him nuts.

When I was young and stupid, not middle-aged and stupid, I thought that no one in his right mind would yearn for less freedom. Yet, by the time I had graduated high school, I had changed my mind. Living has taught me that lots of reasonable people yearn for less freedom; some in marriage, some in the Marines, some in corporations, some in churches, some in cocaine.

Freedom, for many, is a burden, a crushing weight. Having to endlessly think and to act on one's thoughts, having to try and risk failing (or sometimes more intimidating: risk succeeding) is, for many, a terrible pressure. They would rather watch television.

I think people should be free to watch television. I also think people should be free to go anywhere on this planet that they choose to go, and to go naked, if they want.

I also think people should be free to place themselves in any bondage, so long as it's of their own choosing, be it a destructive relationship, a death-worshipping ideology, any number of addictions, or a career as a software engineer for Microsoft.

Some people just want to be less free than others.

And some people just want to be dead.

Recent history offers plenty of evidence that some people who just want to be dead claim they are slaves to high ideals—when in fact they are just using their freedom on this earth to enslave and/or kill others. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mr. and Mrs. Milosevic come to mind.

Every time these nasty people attack free people, free people have to stop them. Why? Because people who want to be dead are incapable of inventing convertible cars, or micro-surgeries, or email, or a map of the human genome. All they are capable of is making themselves, and others, dead.

One current example: Zacarias Moussaoui announced in a United States court that he was "a slave of Allah". I think Moussaoui may well be a Poster Boy for the Qaeda killers, but he isn’t a slave. He’s just someone who can’t handle freedom. His fear of freedom is so extreme that it makes him want to be dead. And he wants everyone else to be dead, too.

Moussaoui will soon be judged by free people who want to live, want to live free, and want to let everyone else live free. If these people determine that Moussaoui is guilty of trying to use his freedom to make people dead, then I think the appropriate solution would be genuine slavery: the complete loss of freedom. Put Moussaoui in jail until he dies; keep him from killing himself, and/or others; let him be confronted every moment of his existence by his terminal impotence.

Immigrants all over this planet are taking big risks to attain more freedom. I admire them. I respect the intestinal fortitude of the men, women and children who somehow manage to get from Iran to France, or from Sudan to Australia, or from Mexico to the United States when so many people, some with guns, some with deadly deceits, are trying so hard to stop them.

Why?

When immigrants manage to move to freer places, they dig right in, begin making choice after choice, taking chance after chance, and sometimes, create magnificent wonders.

I’m not overly concerned about the latest global assault of the death-worshippers on the free. I disagree with those who see this as a new war. This same war raged all of the past bloody century, and in fact, has raged all of man’s time on earth.

Free people are the most potent force man’s imagination and the nurturing of this bountiful planet have yet combined to produce. Free people are so powerful that they are once again vanquishing those seeking to kill them with the proverbial "one hand behind their back".

Free people often fight this way. They are reluctant warriors. They would rather be enjoying their freedom with both hands than fending off the death squads. Look around: Not even a year after a horrific assault on their freedom, free people on this planet are going about their chosen business of living, loving, having fun, helping one another and leaving one another alone, pursuing happiness and creating more choices for humanity, even as they defend their freedom.

Their attackers have been busy dying. Which, after all, is what they want.

Hey. I just found NASA’s website. Maybe they have a link to the Russians and their space program?

I live in a time and place where there are laws guaranteeing me the right to be left pretty much alone, so long as I don’t initiate the use of force to mess with anyone else’s freedom. I could choose to pursue this happy madness of trying to become an astronaut.

Nah.

Instead of choosing to go into space, I am choosing to go into my kitchen.

I am choosing to refill my glass with more of this rather good California merlot, to finish writing this column that no one will read, and to publish it on the world wide web—that magnificent wonder created by people who were left alone to do what they wanted, to pursue their happiness.

Life is good.

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