“Free is when you don’t have to pay for nothing or do nothing. I want to be FREE!”
Frank Zappa first recorded those immortal lines in 1981, which was an impressionable year for a lot of people my age. Too impressionable for some, it seems, judging by the social and political commentary coming from people who, for want of a better description, are ostensibly “grown ass men and women.”
Somehow, despite growing up in a country with safe drinking water, uncontaminated food, and bridges that didn’t fall out from underneath us as we drove over them, my fellow middle-aged Americans have decided that the answer to all of our problems is to get rid of the rules. In other words, “be free.”
So far this “freedom” has brought us deadly lettuce, ever-shrinking public lands, and the knowledge that there is absolutely no place you can go—your school, your church, your doctor’s office, your grocery store, the movies, the dance floor, the mall—and not have to worry about getting shot.
The scariest part of all this, for me, is knowing that my children have never known anything different, which means that every year the chance to bring things “back” to normal gets a little bit smaller. Those of us my age and older—we remember what it was like to live in a time and place where things, while by no means perfect, were slowly getting better. Our children don’t know what that’s like; our children are the first generation to have their life expectancy grow shorter, not because of disease but because of the increased likelihood of death by suicide or drug addiction (which is really just a slow-motion form of suicide).
It’s like when you have an illness that is controlled—not cured, but controlled—by medication. And one day you decide that you feel pretty good—good enough, in fact, that you don’t see the point in taking those pricey and inconvenient pills any longer. And then, when all the symptoms come rushing back, you somehow don’t remember how it was that you treated them in the first place.
In our case, the medication—the bitter pill—was taxes and regulations.
We had already learned—the hard way—that the only way to make things safe for everybody was to hold everybody accountable. That just because you might be wealthy enough never to need to rely on public drinking water, processed meat or open access to public lands didn’t mean you weren’t subject to the same laws and rules as those of us who weren’t so lucky. After all, the men who owned the slaughterhouses that featured so prominently in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle already knew better than to try and eat the products that came out of their charnel houses—the laws were imposed on them to protect us. And this was only after we finally realized that we were the only people who were ever going to protect ourselves. In other words, it was only after we finally realized that the “benevolent overseer” was a myth, and that we were the saviors we had been waiting for all along. It wasn’t the Wizard, it wasn’t the Good Witch—it was just us.
And yet, somehow, here we are again.
I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised. After all, one thing that parenting teaches you is that there is no rule that doesn’t have to be occasionally reinforced. In my house, we called this the Gravity Check, as in, “Does the law of gravity still apply to me?” (Also known as “Do I still get in trouble when I do this?” The answer, of course, is always “yes.”)
My generation, as befitting a generation that has always liked to do things in a big way, is experiencing the biggest Gravity Check of them all. “Do the systems designed to protect us all still work when we dismantle them?” I dunno—does the car still drive when the engine is in pieces on the floor? The answer, as we are too slowly coming to realize, is “no.” Always “no.”