American Freedom and “Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood” on an old French coin
After I came back to Japan from Vancouver, Canada, I started thinking of this question. “What is freedom?” Vancouver is about 2 hours from Seattle by bus. Its downtown and suburban facades are almost the same as the U.S. The area has the same kind of grocery shops and the same style of shopping malls as in the U.S. But the people are different. They do not say dirty words and do not throw garbage on the street. The majority of people seem to be middle class. There are not a large number of poor people like in the U.S.
One day I was eating at a small Chinese fast-food shop in Vancouver and a nice-looking tall guy came to eat. He left his two small dogs tied to something outside the shop and gave a cheerful greeting to the shop owner when he left. The shop was very clean and well-mannered people with different backgrounds came to eat or get take-out food. A memory from a Chinese fast-food shop in the U.S. flashed back in my mind — I was surrounded by many poor people and a lot of garbage on the floor. I sometimes went to a Chinese fast-food shop merely because I like Asian food but many other people seemed to come there because it was cheap.
I used to believe that Europe had culture while the U.S. had freedom when I was a student. I found out that I was right after I traveled to many countries in Europe and stayed in the U.S for a year. However, a week later after I came back from Canada, I started asking myself, “What is freedom? Can one only get freedom by being surrounded by dirty words, garbage and a large number of poor people?”
A few weeks later after I came back from Canada, I found an old French coin, which came to my hand when I visited Paris long ago. It has the words “LIBERTE, EGALITE, FRATERNITE” (Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood) on it. When I saw those words at that time, they did not impress me so much because I thought that many people in the world cerebrate freedom and equality. But after my exploration in other cultures, I found that many — mostly people in Middle East, Asia and Africa — do not, even some westerners prefer rules or tradition rather than freedom.
My image of French had been that they are conservative and proud of French tradition rather than cerebrating freedom. However, I have recently come to feel that France has a tradition of freedom and breaking tradition is also a French custom as I see in its history of the French revolution and the profiles of President Sarkozy and his rival in the presidential election, Segolene Royal.
I understand that some people dislike freedom because they think that freedom leads a society into chaos. But I believe that when all people are educated and the society becomes mature, freedom would have no problem. I guess that in developing countries people of higher class prefer governing people by strict rules instead of educating them to maintain their own power and privilege. Thus people do not know about freedom and come to believe that freedom is bad.
I am still pro-American but I do not believe in American capitalism. Many people in the U.S. often talk about money. If a society does not have a culture, should it exercise its freedom to talk about money? If a society preserves tradition and has a culture, does it mean that people should not enjoy freedom?
