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I had an assignment in my AP US History class today which led to an interesting discussion where people had diametrically opposed opinions. I'm interested to see what TL thinks. Below is the paper and in the spoiler will be my personal response. Please post your own response and reasoning below.
Please rank the following people most free to least free (1 being the freest, 6 being the least free). Think about both what they are free to do and what they are free from doing.
__ An open lesbian woman and her lover in a small homophobic town in middle America.
__ A homeless women and her two children.
__ A 20-year-old man who dropped out of school when he was 16 even though he never learned how to read or write.
__ A successful vice-president of a major corporation who has AIDS.
__ An undocumented woman working for the sub-minimum wage in a garment shop.
__ A 14-year-old teenager with protective parents.
If you're going to respond, please do so before my opinion gives you a bias!
+ Show Spoiler +My numbers went 4, 5, 2, 1, 6, 3 in the order of presentation in the paper. Even though the vice-president is physically sick, he still has the most money which tends to give you the most freedom to do what you want in our society. The undocumented woman is the least free since she can't do anything that would require papers and has the least money (at least as much as the homeless woman, I guess) of all of the others.
A girl sitting next to me argued that the man with AIDS had the least freedom since he was "forced by society" to do his job even in his sickness for the sake of the company and "act correctly" in "high society." She's read Thoreau's Walden two, soon to be three, times, if that lends any insight into her thought process. Personally I think that argument's a load of crap. Nobody's forcing you to conform to society's expectations.
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Trick question, they are all free.
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On February 23 2011 11:46 darmousseh wrote:
Trick question, they are all free.
well okay, if you want to make your definition of "free" "not a slave." Don't you think there are varying degrees of freedom among different people when it comes to how able they are to engage in what they wish to do?
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It depends on what they wish to do.
The VP with AIDS has more freedom to spend money on things he likes while the teenager has more freedom to spend their days how they want with no commitments.
You can't lump everything into one definition of free.
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What does it mean to be free? If it means to be happy with the freedom you are given, then every one of them is as free as they want to be. If it means the amount of freedom other people perceive you to have, then why does it matter? Other people can look in as think what they think, as long as you are happy, you shouldn't let anyone tell you that you aren't free.
So you are an illiterate 20-year-old man who dropped out of school (your last pick). Well, you can either see that as "hey, I'm working 2 jobs at Jewel and McDonalds" or you can see that as "hey, if I continued with school I'd be studying my ass off at college probably wasting my life getting a degree I might not even use." If you are the successful vice-president of a major corporation who has AIDs (your first pick), you could say "hey, I have money and everybody wants to be me" or you can say "well crap, my time on this earth is limited, and I really envy the people who had more time to live."
You see to think that money means more freedom. Yes, money means you can buy a diamond studded iPod case. Does that equal freedom? What about all the time the VP has to spend at his job actually working hard despite the fact that he is about to die. That can't be freedom can it, especially when a 20 year old man with no degree is probably out there partying hard living to 80 despite having no degree?
Arguing one or the other is pretty pointless. Okay, you think money means more freedom. Cool. I don't agree, but you are nowhere near wrong and neither am I, so why are we discussing this? I think the whole point of the discussion as seen from a teacher's perspective would be to provoke discussion on the idea of "freedom" and prove how elusive and indefinite the concept is. The immigrant worker that made the backbone of the monopolies during the Gilded Age might not be "free" from your perspective, but they clearly believed that they had achieved "freedom" from the problems of their homelands.
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None, they are considered deviant to the Westernized norms and values set by society and bias moral upbringing carried through religious teaching and cemented by a lop-sided democracy and law-making system.
The only free person is the Bieber-loving consumerist who values materials more than the traditional sentiments that a Dilbert comic cynically remarks with irony and truthfulness. Let's not ignore the ideal of superficiality and fast-filtering of members within our contextual lifestyle and self-centered obligations with relative little responsibility or knowledge due to the convenience that ease the internet perpetuates alongside narcissism.
Hope that helps :3
P.S: Oh, the 14th Amendment frees a lot of corporations! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
Oh, and if I don't get a gold star for effort, I'm going to smack somebody
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One of the six dragons who never been to the finals even though hes been carrying his team for years.
also 3,5,2,4,6,1
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Pretty interesting. I don't have the time to list my choices or reasons, but I'm going to bookmark this thread.
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None of them. With the possible exception of the VP all of them are very significantly constrained in their options. Having said that, I'll rank them as 3,2,4,1,5,6. Actually scratch that. I'll move the VP from nr.1 to 4. Even though AIDS is probably won't kill him it means he can't hope for a long term relationship with most women. So that's 2,1,3,4,5,6
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Am I the only one who got the following image in their head when they read the title?
+ Show Spoiler +
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On February 23 2011 12:08 Bibbit wrote:Am I the only one who got the following image in their head when they read the title? + Show Spoiler +
nope, right there with you.
came in here and soon became quite confused. i'm still confused, actually
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On February 23 2011 11:46 darmousseh wrote:
Trick question, they are all free.
I agree with this. I think people are confusing opportunity with freedom. In my eyes, they all have the freedom to go do whatever, they may have obligations, or perceived restraints, but in an absolute way, this does not actually limit their freedom.
I think you're definition of freedom is different from mine. As I see it, they all have the same positive liberty, but I think you see it in terms of their negative liberty.
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I don't think it's very meaningful to talk about who is more or less free, since I don't know what that concept means. but I'll list the people who I think are in the best to worst situation
A 14-year-old teenager with protective parents.
An open lesbian woman and her lover in a small homophobic town in middle America.
A 20-year-old man who dropped out of school when he was 16 even though he never learned how to read or write.
A successful vice-president of a major corporation who has AIDS.
An undocumented woman working for the sub-minimum wage in a garment shop.
A homeless women and her two children.
protective parents are looking out for you. you can move out of a small homophobic town if you have the means. you can learn to read and write with patience or get a job that requires it, although it's tough. AIDS is really devastating but if you are otherwise successful it might be a life well-lived. an undocumented woman working for sub-minimum wage is in a pretty awful scenario, but at least such a woman can probably feed herself and doesn't necessarily have kids to support, unlike the last case.
so uh that makes it 2,6,3,4,5,1
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On February 23 2011 12:17 palanq wrote:
protective parents are looking out for you.
I agree that the kid probably has the best life. But that's not the same as freedom. His parents probably tell him how long he can stay up, when he can go out with friends, maybe even forbid him from meeting some friends they see as a bad influence.
You can argue that his level of freedom is appropriate for his age but you can't deny he's not free to make decisions about fairly basic stuff in his life.
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1, 2, 4, 3, 6, 5
Going on the basis of freedom equating to having the opportunity to do as one please without having limitations. The open lesbian can do whatever she likes regardless of how the town feels about her. The town would in fact be in the wrong should they do anything to limit her opportunity and hence her freedom. Kind of iffy with the homeless woman cause you could justify the woman is still able to work, just not be able to afford a home. Not having a home doesn't necessarily limit your options unless it means automatically a lack of employment. If homelessness does indeed leave the woman without employment, then I'll adjust to:
1, 6, 3, 2, 5, 4
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Please rank the following people most free to least free (1 being the freest, 6 being the least free). Think about both what they are free to do and what they are free from doing.
_1_ An open lesbian woman and her lover in a small homophobic town in middle America.
_2_ A homeless woman and her two children.
_3_ A 20-year-old man who dropped out of school when he was 16 even though he never learned how to read or write.
_6_ A successful vice-president of a major corporation who has AIDS.
_5_ An undocumented woman working for the sub-minimum wage in a garment shop.
_4_ A 14-year-old teenager with protective parents.
The lesbians are living there, so they have the choice to live there. They are free to move somewhere else but they don't so it must not be so bad. Or they are comfortable enough with their environment to feel free to live there.
Being that the homeless woman (which btw you typoed in the op) is living off the land and social services I would say she is pretty free in the most primal sense of the word. She can do whatever she wants and really has no one to tell her what to do. She doesn't even have to care for her kids if she doesn't want to, someone will take them.
The 20yo guy can't do simple things that are really important in society these days but he is free because he does what he wants and he chose not to conform. But you can still get through life this way, think if you were in a foreign country without knowing the language. He's free to try and learn to read and write if he wants to try, he's still young.
The VP has aids and he's going to feel trapped in his own body. Even though he may have wealth, he is basically nothing without his job and can't even enjoy some of life's pleasures (even sports or whatever where he may bleed). He's constantly living in fear of his own disease killing him as well as harming others unintentionally. And he is forced to work at his job or else he probably won't be able to afford the expensive health care or medicines.
This is basically slave labor in my eyes. Anyone who has worked ground level blue collar jobs for minimum wage even knows how dreadful that shit is. And it's even worse when you are forced out of your home country to work in terrible conditions for less pay then others and probably leave all your friends and family behind.
Being that he is a kid he enjoys many freedoms. His only real requirements are to go to school. But when people are controlling your life and not giving you the things you want/enjoy in life outside of that, that is pretty bad.
I think this test is really to see what people consider freedom. Money, Love, Knowledge, Health, etc.
In my eyes Health and Knowledge are the most important freedoms. Love I am undecided on. And money is definitely not freedom, it is a product of society that started out as a great idea and has been convoluted into a force of power (usually in the form of negative control).
If you think of the tribe(s) in brazil/amazon where they have never made contact with the outside world, they live exactly how they want to, and they only play by nature's rules. That is the truest freedom to me.
All the material things we acquire and use every day are extraneous to me. I mean I love them and I would be unhappy at first that I didn't have them, but there are still plenty of things humans can do that are just as entertaining. If everyone is on the same level then your status or materials don't generalize what you can or can't do.
For example, there is this girl I know that I am attracted to somewhat and would pursue but her rich lifestyle and attitude about it is a huge turnoff. Even if it didn't bother me, I wouldn't be able to conform with her material standards and it would probably not work out. Society is controlling her and inturn me via money/material wealth.
PS- this is a good thread (:
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Wow, you're APUS class sounds like a lot of fun. All we do is write DBQs about the effectiveness of pre-Gilded age reconstruction movements and such. Personally, I agree with spoR, in that I think freedom revolves around choice, or the potential for choice. No matter your current situation, the freedom to make decisions trumps all.
For instance, who is more free? a homeless person without a penny to his/her name, or an early 19th century slave, who isn't allowed to keep any money or possessions? For me, the easy choice is the homeless person because they have the ability to change their situation, no matter how hard it may actually be.
By my reasoning, I would rank the situations as follows:
_1_ An open lesbian woman and her lover in a small homophobic town in middle America.
_4_ A homeless women and her two children.
_2_ A 20-year-old man who dropped out of school when he was 16 even though he never learned how to read or write.
_5_ A successful vice-president of a major corporation who has AIDS.
_6_ An undocumented woman working for the sub-minimum wage in a garment shop.
_3_ A 14-year-old teenager with protective parents.
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Being free is dictated by the amount of control you have over your mind. You could have spent the Jewish War years in a Nazi Concentration Camp and had been free (There was actually a book written by a prisoner about how he stayed free). You need to know more about people's paradigms before you can dictate whether or not they are actually free.
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Freedom can't be about being able to do whatever you want, it would lose meaning as that is practically impossible. Freedom must be about being able to do what you should be doing.
This is all about context and in the examples there is little in the way of context save for one obvious exception:
The homeless women and her children aren't free on virtue of them lacking an universal human right: The right of having a dignified life.
As for the others I can't think of a convincing argument to "grade" them based on so little information.
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You say Freedom is about being able to do what you should be doing? That is an oxymoron.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://www.mymym.com/gfx/freeAdvancesMSL.jpg)
