China is often criticized for not offering the same freedoms of religion, the media, and expression that the United States offers its citizens.
However, no one seems to question what these freedoms mean and are they real? Do these freedoms put food on the table? Do these freedoms pay the rent or mortgage? Do these freedoms provide jobs and financial security?
Many eligible Americans don’t vote and America’s next president will be decided by a few hundred people in the U.S. Electoral College, so why are these freedoms so important?
I subscribe to Poets and Writers magazine and a line in the March/April 2012 issue caught my attention.
Stephen Morison Jr. wrote a piece called Middle Eastern Rhythms. He interviewed several authors and poets in the middle east where these freedoms Americans take for granted do not exist.
Nourredin Zuhair, a traditional Arabic poet, said, “America was good because it encouraged individuality, but because of capitalism there is only one kind of individuality now… In the contemporary, globalized world, a new kind of censorship means you can never say democracy is bad.”
There is some truth in Zuhair’s words. We may have freedom from government interference in what we say or write, but we are not free from other critics and the special interest mobs that use the media to push political and/or religious agendas causing this form of globalized individuality that Zuhair talks of.
In fact, the so-called free media contributes the most toward the growth of this cloned globalized individual.
Ask someone what these freedoms mean and see what he or she says. Ask if it makes life better
Continued on July 10, 2012 in The meaning of Democracy’s Freedoms and the Nature of the Western Media Beast – Part 2
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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