There are museums of probably everything in the world, but the one on the main street in Chicago, the Freedom Museum, claims to be the first museum in the US dedicated to freedom.
But exhibit after exhibit there show, ironically, how freedom has been attempted to be suppressed, and how controversial freedom can be in a country that thinks of itself as a beacon of the free world.
A very troubling thing is that some exhibits are very recent.
But even more troubling, they show that it is not only the government that seems to have been attempting to suppress freedom in this country from its inception (while claiming, in an orwellian way, to be defending it) - it is countless individuals and groups, the backbone of the American society.
Some are willing to renounce freedoms to win the proverbial "war on terror" (the subtle and not-so-subtle scare-mongering seems to have been successful, after all), some others force songs off the radio stations' playlists because of a single strong word, yet others flood with complaints a major network that has inadvertently shown a nipple, and the fine is imposed, leading to a sort of self-censorship.
Totalitarian trends seem to be very much alive here.
And then there is an even bigger picture.
Try googling a museum of freedom in any other county, and the only small museums of liberty that can be found are dedicated to the wartime liberation of cities such as Cherbourg in France or Bologna in Italy.
Other free countries do not seem to have the need to prove to anyone that they are free. (Much less a need to prescribe freedom to others, but this is another topic altogether.)
Even the biggest freedom controversy of the past decade, the prophet Muhammad cartoon scandal, did not lead to opening museums of freedom in Europe.
Not that other countries did not have historical tensions about freedom, or that they have no current issues, or that freedom should not be actively guarded. It just seems that, for better or worse, freedom by now is taken for granted elsewhere in the free countries just as air - and there seem to be no museums of air anywhere.
Probably it is not a coincidence that the self-described "leader of the free world" is only ranked number 48 in the most recent authoritative press freedom index, below countries like Ghana and Nicaragua, and even this is an improvement over the previous years (the survey, admittedly, is done by a France-based organization; a US-based organization constantly comes up with a different press freedom ranking, and has a different scale of measuring overall freedom).
So maybe that famous inscription in Washington is indeed right: Freedom is not free.
Leave a comment