Lately I have been excessively confronted with an extreme streak of patriotism; people puffing out their chests and chanting "hell yeah America" in unison. Hell yeah what, though? "The Freedom!" they tell me, "its our freedom that makes us great!" Well then, what freedom, I wonder, is it that they are talking about? Perhaps they are talking about the civil liberties we were meant to enjoy via our Constitution, but if so, I hope that that isn't the whole of their argument because that 200 some odd year piece of paper functions as a set of loose guidelines to our corporate government, especially seeing as we as a people leave it up to government to interperate its meaning and disperse (or take) those those freedoms to the public. Sure, we may get some small say in who will interperate those articles, but we have no say in the interperatation itself. Our constitutional right to privacy, for example, which is coming close to non-exsistant thanks to everything from traffic cameras on street lights to the Patriot Act which legally entitles the FBI to search and record and use against you all of your library records, phone records, bank records, financial activity, ect. without your consent, or even having to tell you that you are a suspect of a crime of any kind (which means if you've made too big a credit card payment recently, they probably have all those embarrassing phone calls and emails between you your lover and your spouse recorded). Another example would be the freedom of religion and the separation of church and state, which is defaced by things like gay marriage and the governments bias against it that it goes to such an extreme that if you are gay and you and your life partner have been together for 25 years, and your partner is in the hospital, on his/her deathbed, you wouldn't be allowed to see him/her before they died because without a marriage certificate recognized by the state, you are not considered family. all for religious reasons tied up in politics.Also inhibiting our right to the freedom of religion is the fact that religious symbols are not permitted to be worn in public schools by the children attending. If you wear a cross, you're cool, but if you wear a pentacle, the administration is likely to either ask you to take it off or confiscate it, which one would think that such an obvious prejudice would be frowned on by the monotheists themselves. I'm no pagan, not a religious man at all in fact, but I observe no credible reason to deny the legitimacy of a religion that predates Christianity by thousands of years. How would you? I'm not trying to create an exhaustive lists of hypocrisies and violations, so now I ask, with the limited examples I've provided, are you now remembering or recognizing experiences or observations of your own that stand out against your "freedom"? Maybe you're thinking of a friend thats living in a motel because the city you live in just forced him to sell the house that three generations of his family were raised in, or when you had a girlfriend that was molested by a police officer when she was pulled over, or when your black friend was sentenced to three years in prison for what your white friend is just doing a year of informal probation for. Maybe you're thinking about the thousands and thousands of people that are forced to sleep under bridges in the winter, or the kids that are molested by foster care parents, parents that are out walking the street where your own child sits on a swing in the park and your friend sits in jail for a minor drug offense. 90 % of all arrests made in this country are made of white people, yet the prison population is right around a solid 70 % black... and no, its not because the black people's crimes are worse, its because of bias in the courts, and laws that are race and class oriented, such as the difference in the sentencing terms set between crack and powder. Same drug, yet somehow, if its powder it takes a hundred grams to put you in a cell for ten years, where just 10 grams of crack will get you the same sentence. Pretty fucked up right? I'm sure you can find hundreds upon thousands of examples of your own especially if you are concerned for your freedom. Which is a point about patriotism that I'll bring up later.Now that I'm on a rant about why this country is screwed, I'm reminded of one of the most popular arguments against my case: the argument of comparison. This is the point in the conversation where people tend to want to say things like "Perhaps we're flawed, but you better kneel and give thanks that you don't live in Africa, or Nazi Germany, or the middle east, or Soviet Russia. You don't know how good you have it." I have serious problems with this argument. First of all, yes I do realize that I'm living in paradise compared to the conditions that citizens of Dar fur are forced to endure, but freedom by comparison isn't freedom. To illustrate that point I'll point out that citizens of Iraq in a time of war are living a far better life than the citizens of Dar fur, but I'd wager that you wouldn't call Iraq a paradise, would you?Sure, compared to Nazi Germany, especially were I a jew, I am a helluva lot freer... but freer is not FREE. Also, I'd like to point out that much of the conditions in these worse scenario countries are contributed largely by America itself. Our corporations own sweatshops and our people gladly support them with purchase. Our international sanctions empower tyrants, our guns start wars, our greed starves children both at home and in these foreign countries. We shoot, lie, steal and bomb all around the world because no one can stop us, and we are always wanting more and more and more. And then you have to think, as far as comparison goes, what about comparing us to any other industrialized country, and looking at health care. We are the ONLY industrialized country that doesn't have some sort of national health care coverage, in the world. Even countries labeled terrorist countries take care of their own citizens health. Yet here in america, land of the free, the poverty stricken die in the streets or in crowded emergency rooms, or prisons, because privatized health care and insurance companies make more money that way. Our citizens die of curable epidemics because the dollar bills in their pockets just don't stretch far enough. And though it might seem odd how cruel our own people can be, we were a country that exists because of genocide and slavery. Oh, and the French, lets not forget the fact that it was their aid that won us finally the revolutionary war. Revolution. thats what patriotism used to mean. I'm called a commie (im not by the way) by self-labeled patriots every time a vocally criticize the American government. WHAT? Although our "founding fathers" had their hypocrisies, they also believed that when a government exercises power against its people, it needs to be questioned ESPECIALLY if its ours. thats why Benjamin Franklin, a true American legend, said that dissent is the highest form of patriotism. Blindly following your government isn't patriotism, its mindless, its a mass slavery mentality. Patriotism was supposed to mean standing up to your government, changing whats fucked, protecting the people from power, not cowering before it. I am not a patriot. I do not love my government, I do not love my country, I do not love our economy, I do not love our consumer culture, and I do not love bullies, especially bullies armed with nukes proclaiming that they have a "final solution". I want FREEDOM. Real patriots used to say that not even death was too high a price to pay for liberty, now patriotism is apparently when we puff out your chest and shout "Hell yeah America, take my liberty, keep me safe!"...but you're not safe, and you're not free....and you need to start asking why.