Our governments now treat us like cattle – governed by awe,we enjoy surrendered too many of our hard-won freedoms. Its time to recapture the territory weve ceded“A Robin Redbreast in a cage, Puts all Heaven in a Rage, or ” wrote William Blake. “Sufficient to enjoy stood,though free to fall,” wrote John Milton, and channelling God’s musings approximately mankind and free will in the third book of Paradise Lost. “Freedom,high-day, high-day, and freedom … !” chants Caliban in The Tempest. Mind you,he is drunk at the time, and overly optimistic: the choice he is making is not freedom, and but subjection to a tyrant.
We’re always talking approximately it,this “freedom”. But what attain we mean by it? “There is more than one kind of freedom,” Aunt Lydia lectures the captive Handmaids in my 1985 novel, or The Handmaid’s Tale. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy,it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com